Is Multitasking Feminine? Do Women Naturally Have a Multi-Track Mind?

Long before there were computers that multitask and enable users to multitask, the female member of the human race had mastered the art of multitasking. I could cite many examples, but the last thing I want is to worship the feminine. So I will keep my illustrations to a minimum.

My wife carries the multitask gene. Miss Harriet can talk on the phone, stir the food she's cooking, do laundry, eat an apple, and communicate with a teenager ALL at the same time. She can do this while the television is on, the radio is playing music over her favorite station, the dog is barking, our preschooler is bouncing her basketball, and the rest of us babbling, giggling or carrying on about whatever.

I simply marvel at this dexterous genius. By glaring contrast, when I'm on the phone, I demand a near total quiet audio environment, or I'll just pack myself and head into the nearest empty room and shut the door, so I can concentrate on my phone conversation.

This proves that it was a guy who first thought about inventing a computer to sort of even the keel in his competition with a multitasking girl. The guy needed a computer to help him multitask and keep up with the gal, a natural multitasker.

When a computer connects with the natural multitasker aka woman, the observant guy is forced to once again acknowledge his disadvantage.

Take two typists. One a woman, the other a man. Which of them will be the faster typist? The woman, hands down.

In our town, the mortgage reviewers at US Bank are mostly women, and every female reviewer gets more files done on any given day of the week than any guy with equivalent experience or tenure in the mortgage department. You can see mortgage file-reviewing girls on their MP3 players and ipods, carrying on girlish conversations within and across borders of cubicles, and still outperform the guys at the end of every work day.

How do I know? I was one of those guys who reviewed mortgage files for US Bank. I thought I got beat by the American women, because my African upbringing somehow put me at an advantage. But when I began to peak at the performance numbers of other male reviewers, I found my figures were better than many of them. Strange thing is, I was the only male reviewer in an office with ladies, five of them, when everyone showed up for work.

Finally, after working some Saturdays just to keep my numbers near those of the gals, I got tired of the ruthless competition, which I lost 90% of the time. I did the next manly thing: I QUIT. That's right. For one thing the environment became a little too noisy for me to be productive in. My single-track mind needed a completely noise-free zone to make my way smoothly and swiftly through mortgage files at a productive rate.

But there are few places to hide, when a guy decides to flee from these computer-savvy typing machines we call girls, gals, ladies or women. I have one of them under my roof, from my very loins. It was in middle school that Daneto, our first daughter learned how to type, and shortly after that she became a faster typist than Dad. Not only that, but I can only marvel at Daneto's texting speed on her Motorola phone. She can do more with pictures on the computer and over the Internet than I have time for or care about. I stumbled onto her Twitter account recently and found she tweets more frequently than a tweety bird. I'm not going to say how many tweets she has here...like she started tweeting before I was born or something.

So, here, I'm laying down all my excuses and rationalizations: girls are natural multaskers, and as a bonus they were born to be speedy typists too. Get over it, guys. Celebrate the girl. Better yet, just pay her to do your typing.