Ted Barris

I was on my cellphone several times during a recent trip to Ottawa. I had a couple of conversations with family while I was in the National Capital attending meetings of The Writers’ Union of Canada. I also texted several of my colleagues back at the college about some of the writers’ workshops I attended. But once, last Thursday, I was doing something completely unrelated when I took a cellphone call from newspaper reporter Katie Starr of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

“I’m doing a story about a veteran friend of yours,” she said. “Do you have time for an interview?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I’m in the middle of something.”

No. I was not driving at the time. I wasn’t breaking the law at all. However, I was actually dealing with a legal issue at that moment. It may seem odd, but as I began to answer questions from reporter Starr, I was walking into the Centre Block on Parliament Hill and about to go through a security check. There were so many school kids, adult tour groups and others on Parliamentary business entering the building, that the screening location inside the front doors was quite backed up.

Nevertheless, I kept on juggling. I emptied my pockets as I answered the reporter’s questions. Then, when I got to the front of the line, while I was still talking on the phone, I motioned to the security guy that I have a pacemaker and could not go through the electronic screening device.

“Have you ever had a pat-down?” the guard asked politely.

I nodded, told him I’d been body-searched a million times and so he began even as I continued the telephone interview. But then he motioned for me to put the contents of my pockets and whatever I was holding through the scanner while he finished frisking me. It wasn’t until later that I realized I had successfully completed a complicated multi-tasking exercise – talking, listening, motioning and being frisked all at once.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. We all multi-task these days. Moms and dads do it when they cook, do laundry or pick up toys while also settling an argument among their children. Pilots do it while listening to air traffic controllers during takeoff and landing. Paramedics do it as they triage at a car crash or in the emergency ward of a busy hospital. And – in the perfect physical representation of the problem – jugglers do it while talking, walking or doing acrobatics at the same time they’re keeping bowling pins, burning torches or knives circulating from one hand to the other.

Perhaps the closest I’ve come to real multi-tasking was when I worked in radio news as a live-to-air announcer. Before every top-of-the-hour newscast, as much as possible, I would time out each story (including recorded inserts and copy) to make sure they added up to the five- or 10-minute broadcast. Inevitably, because this was news, a live report or unexpected question-and-answer debrief with a reporter would throw off my timing and I would have to improvise as I read.

All the while, a producer might be telling me in my headset to ask “such-and-such” a question or to wrap things up in 10 or 15 seconds. No matter what happened, I had to end the newscast at the prescribed time with, “and that’s the CBC News,” or the computer would cut me off in mid-sentence. Doing news that way meant being announcer, interviewer and editor all at once.

All that pales, however, next to Bob Dale. On an historic day – exactly 69 years ago this week – RCAF Flight Lieutenant Dale navigated his wartime aircraft across the English Channel toward Hitler’s Fortress Europe. He and Nigel Bicknell, the pilot of their two-seater Mosquito fighter, had been dispatched to reconnoitre weather conditions over the coast of occupied France. They knew an important military operation was coming, but they didn’t know when or where. So, navigator Dale had to guide pilot Bicknell over about 300 kilometres of shoreline, while he simultaneously recorded cloud conditions, wind velocity, height of swells and any other important conditions he might notice over the Normandy coast.

Oh yes, he also had to avoid being shot down by enemy aircraft as he accomplished the mission. Now that’s multi-tasking. And why was F/L Dale doing all this? Well, because about a million military personnel in Britain were waiting for the green light to launch the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. To quote General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who awaited Dale’s observations: “The mighty host was tense as a coiled spring.”

But in fact, based on Dale’s skilful multi-tasking on June 4, all military operations by Allied forces from Britain to France were postponed 24 hours, from June 5. As history shows, D-Day occurred a day later on June 6. And of course the invasion required a brand of multi-tasking all its own.

In any case, it sure beats juggling a security check during a cellphone interview.