How I paid for my own leash, and spent 25 years learning to take it off
This week, the East Coast is bracing for snow. Schools might close. Federal offices might announce "maximum telework." And across the Washington, D.C. metro area, something will happen that would have been unthinkable in 1999: nothing will actually shut down.
The snow will fall, the roads will be impassable, and everyone will log in from their kitchen tables, Slack notifications pinging, Zoom calls scheduled, the work continuing as if the weather didn't matter at all.
I am watching this unfold from Costa Rica, where I've lived since 2014, and I thought about how different things were when I started my career, how a snow day used to mean something, how the leash we now wear so casually was something I once paid for out of my own pocket, thrilled to clip it to my belt.
This is the story of how we lost the ability to disconnect, and how I've spent the last decade trying to get it back.
When Snow Days Were Real
In 1999, I was 22, fresh out of college, working at Ogilvy Public Relations in downtown Washington, D.C.
We had massive, clunky desktop computers on our desks, the kind you actually turned off every night before going home. The kind that stayed in the office because that's where they belonged. There was no concept of "taking your work with you." Your work lived on a machine that weighed forty pounds and sat under a desk in a building you commuted to.
I remember my first snow day at that job. The feeling was identical to being a kid in the 1980s, waking up early to watch the local news. While the anchors discussed road conditions and showed footage of plows struggling through drifts, a ticker at the bottom of the screen listed the schools that were closed.
You had to wait for your school's name to appear. If you missed it, you watched the whole scroll again. Nothing was instant. You earned that information.
As an adult in Washington, the stakes were the same, just bigger. The ticker didn't just list schools; it listed the federal government as well. And in D.C., if the federal government closed, everything closed. The head of the Office of Personnel Management made the call for the entire region. Private businesses followed suit because there was no point opening when half your workforce couldn't get there, and the other half was watching the same ticker you were.
When OPM said "closed," downtown Washington became a ghost town. A literal ghost snow town.
And here's the thing: we didn't know what was happening at work because no one was at work.
Your Microsoft Word documents were inside the office. Your Excel spreadsheets were inside the office. Your email was on a server that might as well have been on the moon. The office voicemail system let you dial in and punch in your extension to retrieve messages, but even if you had an urgent voicemail, what exactly were you going to do about it? The files you needed, the network you needed, the colleagues you needed: they were all in a building you couldn't reach.
So we did what people do on snow days. We put on boots and winter coats. We went outside. We played in the snow. We made hot cocoa and watched movies. We didn't check our phones because our phones were landlines mounted to kitchen walls, and they weren't ringing because everyone else was playing in the snow, too.
VPNs weren't an option. Remote desktop wasn't an option. Most people didn't even have computers at home, and those who did connected through dial-up services like AOL or Earthlink, fine for checking personal email, useless for anything resembling work.
A snowstorm in 1999 was a day off. A real day off. The kind where work didn't just pause; it ceased to exist.
The Nerd's Advantage
By 2001, I was still at Ogilvy, and I'd done something unusual: I'd ordered a DSL line to my apartment.
This was expensive. This was a splurge. I did it because I was a tech nerd who spent weekends at computer shows, building my own machines, tinkering with hardware. The DSL line wasn't for work. It was because I wanted it.
But being a nerd had workplace implications.
I found the IT guy in the office one day, a fellow tech enthusiast, and explained my situation. I had this DSL line at home, I said. I was wondering what I could do with it.
He got excited. "Bring in your computer," he said. "I'll get your work email installed on it."
This was 2001. Gmail didn't exist yet. Web-based email meant Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, fine for personal correspondence, but corporate email ran on Lotus Notes, and companies weren't set up to let employees remote into that. The complexity wasn't there. The infrastructure wasn't there.
But the IT guy knew a workaround. He got my work email running on my home machine, and suddenly I could do something almost no one else at the agency could: check my corporate email from outside the office.
I thought this was the coolest thing in the world.
I could respond to emails over the weekend. I could stay in the loop during snow days. I could show off to the senior staff by being responsive when everyone else was unreachable.
But here's the thing: I still went outside. I still played in the snow. My girlfriend and I still made hot cocoa and watched movies. I didn't spend snow days refreshing my email. I had the capability to stay connected, but the culture hadn't yet caught up. Nobody expected me to be available. The fact that I could check email was a novelty, not an obligation.
I had, briefly, the best of both worlds.
The Leash I Bought Myself
Then I saw the BlackBerry.
I was watching the business news channel (Ogilvy kept all the networks streaming on TVs throughout the office), and they were covering this Canadian company called Research In Motion. They had a device that was basically a pager with a tiny keyboard. The screen was small, maybe the size of my old SkyTel pager. But it could receive email.
Not just any email. Your corporate email. On your hip. Anywhere.
I'd thought remote email access was revolutionary when it was tethered to a desktop computer in my apartment. Now there was a device that could do it wirelessly and portably while you walked down the street.
I looked up the price. A little over $100, plus a service commitment. For a junior agency employee in 2001, that was real money. I had to think about it. I had to save.
Eventually, EarthLink ran a promotion that let me bundle a BlackBerry with my DSL service. It was probably more than I could afford, but I couldn't resist. I scratched the itch.
I brought my new Blackberry to the IT guy, eager to connect it to my corporate mail. He looked at it and shook his head.
"We'd need a special server for that," he said. "Licenses. We're not even giving these to the senior VPs yet."
Translation: A junior employee definitely couldn't have it.
"Could I at least forward my corporate email to it?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Yeah, we could set that up."
So we did. A universal forward from my Lotus Notes account to my Earthlink address, which synced to my Blackberry. It was a kludge, but it worked.
I clipped that device to my belt and felt like the coolest person in Washington, D.C. I had an email on my hip. It buzzed when messages arrived. I could read one or two lines at a time and respond with my thumbs. The senior VPs didn't have this. The account directors didn't have this. I was a junior employee with better connectivity than anyone in the building.
What I didn't realize, what none of us realized, was that I had just paid for my own leash.
The company didn't buy that BlackBerry. I did it out of my own pocket. Because the technology was so novel and exciting, I wanted to be reachable. The idea that this might someday feel less like empowerment and more like imprisonment? It never crossed my mind.
When Connectivity Became Mandatory
September 11, 2001, changed everything.
In the aftermath of the attacks, the federal government made connectivity a priority. Cell networks were overwhelmed that day, but BlackBerry's infrastructure stayed up. The devices worked when phone calls didn't. The government noticed.
Within months, the feds had struck deals with Verizon and RIM to get Blackberry devices into the hands of federal employees. The reasoning was emergency preparedness: if disaster struck again, people needed to be reachable. The private sector followed suit.
Big agencies started by giving Blackberries to senior staff: senior vice presidents, C-suite executives, people important enough to justify the expense. The devices were still pricey, so they weren't handing them out like candy. But the logic was clear: a client should be able to reach a senior agency leader at any time.
The original thinking was narrow. We imagined using these devices during client trips, during campaign launches, during the occasional evening or weekend when something urgent came up. Nobody was talking about 24/7 availability. Nobody was warning about what constant connectivity might do to your peace of mind, your mental health, your family time.
We were too excited to notice the trap closing around us.
Those early BlackBerrys were limited, though. You could receive emails and respond, but you couldn't open documents. You couldn't access your network files. If someone asked for an attachment, you'd write back: "That's on the mainframe at work. I'll send it when I'm back in the office."
We felt important writing those emails. We felt connected, in the know, and responsive. But we weren't truly burdened yet. Snow days still existed. Sick days still existed. You could acknowledge a message and defer the actual work until you were back at your desk.
January 19, 1999: The first BlackBerry device, the 850, launches. It's not a phone; it's a two-way pager with email capability. The QWERTY keyboard reminds designers of the seeds on a blackberry fruit, giving the device its name.
September 11, 2001: The BlackBerry's network stays operational while cell networks fail, cementing its reputation for reliability. Government and enterprise adoption accelerates.
2002: RIM releases the BlackBerry 5810, the first device that can make phone calls (with an external headset). Within two years, RIM reports over 1 million subscribers.
2006: Webster's New World College Dictionary names "Crackberry" its Word of the Year, acknowledging the device's addictive reputation.
The nickname said it all. We knew these things were habit-forming. We joked about it, called ourselves addicts, and laughed at how we couldn't put them down. The culture treated this as charming rather than concerning.
The Tightening
By 2004, I was working for myself, a partner in a design studio in Washington, D.C. We made a collective decision: the company would buy everyone a Blackberry and cover the cell phone bills.
Around the same time, the big, clunky desktops were being replaced by laptops. IBM ThinkPads had become affordable enough that companies were issuing them to employees. For the first time, you could take your files with you.
The combination was potent. Now, when your Blackberry buzzed with a request, you didn't have to say, "I'll handle that when I'm back at the office." You could open your laptop, find the file, and say, "Let me send that to you as soon as I can get online."
WiFi was spreading. Starbucks had it. Other cafes were adding it. More and more laptops came with built-in wireless radios. The "as soon as I can get online" part was getting shorter and shorter.
We still talked about this as empowerment. Our studio reached a point where every employee had a laptop and a BlackBerry, and we saw this as a competitive advantage. We could work from anywhere. We could offer flexibility. We could eliminate the rigid requirement to be physically present in the office every minute of every day.
But the expectations were shifting beneath us.
I remember a client call around 2007 or 2008. By then, we'd gone fully mobile. We'd replaced our office landline with a Vonage VoIP system that routed calls to our corporate Blackberries based on extension. The devices weren't just email machines anymore; they were our phones.
I had something to do that day, so I pulled over at a quiet cafe to take the meeting. The connection was crystal clear. But the client could hear a little movement behind me: other patrons, maybe a barista steaming milk.
"Are you not in the office?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, "I'm actually working from a cafe."
She paused. "Let's reschedule this for when you're back in the office."
I tried to explain that we were 100% mobile now. That if I called from the office, I'd be using the same connection, the same laptop, the same phone. There was no technical difference.
She wasn't convinced. "You do still have an office, don't you?"
We did. But I learned something that day: the culture hadn't caught up to the technology. Serious work was still supposed to happen in serious places. Being mobile meant you weren't being serious.
I took the lesson to heart. Clients wouldn't take me seriously if I were out and about. They'd think I was playing, not working.
The Squeeze
June 29, 2007: Apple releases the first iPhone. Steve Jobs calls it "a revolutionary product that changes everything." RIM's co-CEO, Jim Balsillie, responds: "It's ok, we'll be fine."
Within a year, the iPhone had an App Store. Within three years, BlackBerry's dominance was crumbling. By 2010, Blackberry still held 43% of the U.S. smartphone market, but the trajectory was clear. By 2013, they'd dropped below 6%.
But the shift from BlackBerry to iPhone wasn't the real story. The real story was what any smartphone did to the boundaries between work and life.
The term "work-life balance" first appeared in the UK in the 1980s, part of the Women's Liberation Movement's push for flexible schedules and maternity leave. But it didn't enter mainstream American discourse until the late 1990s, and it didn't become a common business phrase until the 2000s. In 1996, major newspapers ran about 32 articles using the term. By 2007, that number had grown to 1,674.
The conversation was happening because the problem was becoming undeniable.
Somewhere around 2008 to 2010, the reality started crashing down on me. We were available 24/7. Some people still saw this as positive. They'd openly share their mobile numbers and tell clients, "You can reach me anytime you need me." It sounded like a great sales pitch. I am available to you at all times. What could be more customer-focused than that?
Articles celebrated how remote work would let parents be home when their kids got out of school. No more latchkey children. The American family would be empowered, strengthened, and liberated.
The squeeze came gradually, then all at once.
As a web developer responsible for hosting environments, my clients began expecting me to be available around the clock. If a website went down on a Saturday night, they wanted a response within minutes. If they had an idea on Sunday morning, they expected to be able to discuss it with me.
At first, I pushed back with passive aggression. If someone sent a non-urgent request on the weekend, a sentence change to a webpage, or a new page they needed for a Monday meeting, I'd ignore it. I'd tell myself that was my time, that they could wait.
But they'd send follow-up messages. "Hey, why haven't you responded?" Then angrier follow-ups. "This is the third message I've sent you."
I'd make excuses on Monday. "I was hanging out with my daughter this weekend." "We had family plans." "I wasn't at home." I was trying to communicate boundaries without having to draw them explicitly.
One client told me they were furious. They'd written me Friday night and hadn't heard back until Monday morning. That was unacceptable, they said. They were probably going to find another developer.
I remember my blood boiling. Fine, I thought. Find someone who wants to work for you 24/7.
But here's what was really happening: even when I refused to respond, I was never at peace. Every notification made me jump. Every buzz sent a spike of anxiety through my chest. And when I ignored a message, the dread of Monday morning began immediately. The client was waiting. The client was angry. The unread message sat there, poisoning my weekend even though I never opened it.
I had a young daughter. I wanted to be a good father. I wanted to be present. But I found myself constantly stressed, always thinking about work, unable to fully engage with my family, even when I was physically with them.
I could be home when my daughter got out of school at 3 p.m. That was the promise of remote work. But I spent most of those afternoon hours checking my phone, stressing about when she'd leave me alone long enough to reply to an email.
The leash I'd paid for out of my own pocket in 2001 had become a noose.
The Escape That Wasn't
In 2014, my family decided to move to Costa Rica.
There were many reasons. But one of them, one I didn't fully articulate at the time, was the crushing level of stress that came from working and living in such a connected environment. We wanted to slow down. We wanted a different pace of life.
The irony should have been obvious: I was bringing my work with me. The whole point of remote work was that you could do it from anywhere. Escaping Washington, D.C. wouldn't mean escaping the clients, the servers, the websites, the constant demands.
What I was really trying to escape was the environment. The mindset. The culture that treated constant availability as normal.
The first few years in Costa Rica, 2014 to 2019, were brutal.
I was in a new location. My surroundings were slower, more peaceful. I didn't have a commute. I didn't have downtown meetings. I was watching the sunset over the Pacific at 5 p.m. instead of sitting on the Washington Metro, wondering if the person coughing next to me would make me sick.
But the connectivity in Costa Rica wasn't great. I paid $100 a month for a line that delivered 15 Mbps down and 5 up, a step backward in time. Worse, the connection was spotty. It wasn't uncommon for the internet to go out for several hours at a time.
When that happened, I'd have to get in my car and drive somewhere with WiFi. I'd sit in a parking lot or a café, stressed out of my mind, trying to get back online before some emergency landed in my inbox that I couldn't handle.
I'd moved to Costa Rica to relax. Instead, my stress levels increased. The technology I'd built my business around now felt fragile and unreliable. Every outage was a crisis. The anxiety was constant.
And here's the part that still haunts me: it wasn't just anxiety about actual emergencies. It was anxiety about potential emergencies. When my phone was quiet, when the notifications weren't buzzing, I felt worse. What if something was down and I wasn't getting the alert? What if the silence meant the system had failed?
I developed ulcers. I planned family vacations around my on-call schedule, insisting on red-eye flights because I was less likely to get an urgent message at 3 a.m. I limited how many hours I could be in the air, how many days I could be truly offline.
The leash had followed me across international borders and gotten tighter.
Cutting the Leash
Around 2019 or 2020, I finally cracked down.
I built systems. Protocols. Expectations. Barriers.
I implemented a support ticket system and told my clients: Do not email me. I don't read personal email. (This was a lie, but that's what I told them.) If you need support, use the ticket system.
I hired team members to monitor tickets when I wasn't available. The system sent immediate alerts. We triaged everything. It was, genuinely, the fastest way to get our attention.
I changed our phone system. When you call our number, you hear an automated menu. Are you a prospective client? The phones ring, and we'll talk. Are you a current client? The system tells you to open a support ticket. We don't take unscheduled phone calls.
We don't allow clients to Slack us or send instant messages. We don't give out personal cell phone numbers. Everything funnels through the ticket system.
This wasn't about efficiency, though the efficiency argument is real. It works better for clients, it works better for our team, and it creates a single channel of communication where nothing gets lost.
But the real reason? The real reason was to cut my leash.
I was no longer going to be available 24/7. I was no longer going to let my mental health deteriorate because someone had an idea at 11 p.m. and couldn't wait until morning.
When I tell clients I don't provide my personal cell phone number, the initial reaction is often hostile. They want a direct line. They promise to use it only in emergencies.
That's exactly the problem, I explain. Your idea of an emergency is not necessarily my idea of an emergency. And once you have my number, you'll use it whenever you think the situation warrants it, not when I do.
If they let me finish explaining, the hostility usually turns to something else. "Wow," they'll say. "That's so smart. I wish I could do that."
You can do that, I tell them. It just takes time. It takes training.
We call it "training our clients." If someone emails us directly instead of using the ticket system, we ignore it for hours. Then we move the message into the ticket system and respond from there. If someone gets my text number during a one-time emergency, I respond only during that emergency, then I ignore all future texts. When they complain, I tell them, "I don't receive texts unless I'm expecting them. Please use the ticket system."
It sounds harsh. It is harsh. But it's also necessary.
Even an emergency room physician has on-call hours and off-call hours. Why should a web developer be available 24/7?
The 2FA Incident
This week, I was working with a client on a technical issue that required two-factor authentication codes. The codes expire quickly, and we were having trouble getting the timing right.
"Just text me," the client said. "I'll text you the code as soon as I get it."
And there it was. The exact scenario I'd built my entire system to prevent.
I live in Costa Rica. International texting is complicated. My U.S. clients aren't used to receiving messages from foreign numbers. That alone is a reason to avoid it.
But the bigger reason is what happens next. Once that client has my text number, even for a one-time 2FA exchange, they have it forever. They think: I have a direct line now. I don't need the ticket system. I can reach Shane whenever I want.
It doesn't matter that the ticket system is faster. It doesn't matter that we triage tickets 24/7. The client believes, because humans always believe, that a personal number is better than a formal system. That bypassing the protocol is a sign of special access.
So now, instead of opening a ticket when she has a midnight crisis, she'll text me directly. She'll wake someone on my team who isn't even on call that night, because she thinks the text is the fast track.
The leash starts tightening again.
I had a similar situation with international clients who asked for my WhatsApp. Same problem, different technology. Now they can reach me in group chats that start in the middle of my night because they're on the other side of the world.
Every exception I make weakens the system I've built to protect my sanity.
What I've Learned
In 1999, I watched a ticker scroll across the bottom of a TV screen and felt genuine joy when OPM announced federal offices were closed. I went outside and played in the snow.
In 2001, I paid over $100 I couldn't afford for a device that put email on my hip, and I thought I was living in the future.
In 2007, I took a client call from a café and learned that flexibility was still seen as frivolity.
In 2014, I moved to Costa Rica to escape the stress of constant connectivity, only to find the leash had followed me.
This week, I watch the East Coast brace for snow and see "maximum telework" announced, and I understand, in a way I couldn't have understood 25 years ago, what we've lost.
We lost the snow day.
We lost the sick day.
We lost the ability to be unreachable without it feeling like a dereliction of duty.
We gained mobility. We gained flexibility. We gained the ability to work from anywhere, to run businesses from our pockets, to be present for our children's after-school hours in a way our parents never could.
But we also gained a leash. And the worst part is, we bought it ourselves. We were so excited about the technology, so eager to be connected, so convinced that reachability was a competitive advantage, that we never stopped to ask what we were giving up.
The snow still falls. The federal government is still closed. But the work never stops.
I've spent the last five years building systems to reclaim what we lost. Ticket systems, phone trees, trained expectations, and the willingness to tell clients, directly and without apology, that I do not provide my personal cell phone number.
It works. Mostly. The leash is looser than it was in 2011, when I was planning vacations around red-eye flights and developing ulcers from the anxiety of silence.
But every new client, every exception, every "just this once" text message threatens to pull it tight again.
The technology that promised to set us free has become the technology we have to build defenses against. And the strangest part is that I still love it. I couldn't run my business without it. I couldn't live in Costa Rica, watching Pacific sunsets, without the very connectivity that nearly destroyed my peace of mind.
The trick isn't rejecting the technology. It's setting boundaries that the technology didn't come with.
Nobody taught us how to do that. We're still figuring it out, one ignored text message at a time.
Shane Larrabee has been building websites since 1994 and running FatLab Web Support since 2011. He currently manages 200+ WordPress sites from Costa Rica, where the sunsets are beautiful, and the internet is mostly reliable. He hasn't checked his email in the last 3 minutes, and he's proud of that.