From time to time, office life breeds a catchphrase that sounds deeply strange and yet makes sense as soon as someone says it.

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Beware the 'desk-bombers': Anxiety over unscheduled office conversations the latest worker malady Back to video

I came across one the other day: “desk-bombing.”

As a colleague at work explained, this is the act of approaching someone at their desk without warning, and talking to them.

You are joking, I said.

I am not, he replied.

He had heard it from a man he had been working with at another company who had spent days vainly emailing a woman to get something approved, even though she sat within eyesight in the same office.

With time ticking on, my colleague got fed up and said: “Why don’t you just go over and ask her to approve it?” The other man, visibly appalled, said no. “I’m not just going to go and desk-bomb her.”

My colleague gawped. Since when had something as innocuous as asking someone an unscheduled question at work become so offensive that an entire buzzword had been invented to describe it?

If this were a random, isolated instance of inanity, I would ignore it.

But it is part of a pattern that seems to be on the march: an outbreak of overweening shyness, or intolerance of interruption, that is at best self-destructive and at worst unproductive and annoying.

I say this as a chronic desk-bomber, surrounded by other bombers. None of us would waste time faffing around with an email when we could simply talk to someone face to face instead. It’s more efficient and usually more enjoyable.

People wearing headphones are given a wide berth, obviously. So is anyone staring at their screen with a panicked look on their face. But otherwise, all are more or less fair bombing game.

I might have felt more shy about this when I first joined the FT but even then, the idea of sending a message from my desk would have seemed dull and futile.

If you think anyone fearing a desk-bomb is likely to be under 30 years old, you may be wrong. As a 20-something colleague told me the other day, he once sat next to a 40-something person who used to send him emails about work tasks. “What did you do?” I asked. “I emailed back and said ‘OK’,” he said.

Still, fear of desk-bombing is related to another curious fact of office life — an aversion to using the phone — which does seem more prevalent among younger people. More than 80 per cent of Americans between 22 and 37 years old have to gird themselves to make a phone call because they are so anxious about mucking up, one U.S. survey showed in 2018.

Parents of very successful millennials have told me over the years that their children still ask them to phone for a dental appointment, or order takeaways. The parents, like me, find this baffling. But we grew up with landlines and learnt to answer the phone as children, so we take phone skills for granted, says Mary Jane Copps, founder of a Canadian phone use consultancy called The Phone Lady.

“For somebody who’s never had to answer a phone, they have no idea what’s going to happen, they’re frozen,” she told me last week, by phone.

Her company charges banks and other companies up to US$3,100 a day to train staff who seem to be increasingly fearful about phone calls. “I would say 40 per cent of my business is now focused on phone anxiety, whereas when I started the company 16 years ago it might have been 10 per cent,” she said, adding not all of the phone-phobic are young.

For one thing, everyone is busy and phone calls can take more time. Also, the first BlackBerry devices went on sale in the 1990s. “We’ve been talking with our thumbs ever since,” says Copps. “It doesn’t matter what generation you’re from.”

The good news is that it is not that hard to get over phone fear. It just takes practice, says Copps, whose techniques include requiring people to go without texting or emailing anyone for at least three days, and only using the phone.

I recommend a similar approach for anyone who is ever gulled into thinking there is such a thing as desk-bombing.

© 2022 The Financial Times Ltd