A Horrible Reliance on Technology...

I promise not to complain about my job today. Nor will I complain about the office building. I tend to get on a subject and stay there for a while so I'm going to make myself move away onto something else.

Technology, for example.

Once upon a time, there was a society of people who used to have to visit one another in order to have a conversation. They could write letters but there was no Fed Ex, no Next Day Air, there was only the old fashioned method of someone delivering a letter as soon as they could. Then, came telephones. Then, I'm pretty sure came telegrams although they might have come before telephones. I'm not sure.

Telegrams were a way of getting a message quickly to someone by having an office write it out and then deliver the message that came over 'the wire.'

For many years, society lived with only one phone in their house and only telegrams and mail post to get messages to one another. If they wanted to speak to their wife, child, aunt, uncle, friend, they had to make sure that the recipent either had access to a little old telephone or they had to get off their behinds and find them.

Then came...cell phones and the internet and many, many ways of finding instant gratification when you needed to talk to someone, get them a message or send them a package.

Thus, I give you....our spoiled little generations who can no longer function without the use of technology because we've forgotten how to do so.

I am including myself in this group because today I experienced a prime example of how useless we are without technology.

It all started when I dropped my phone in the toilet. Fortunately, I hadn't gone to the bathroom yet. Fortunately, there was no one at work in the bathroom besides me so no one could see what I was doing through the backwards-doors-that-you-shouldn't-really-be-able-to-see-into-but-you-can-anyway. I retrieved it quickly, took out the battery and did my best to pat it down with soap without making it any wetter. I also scrubbed my hands. A lot.

Needless to say, my phone ceased working. The screen began to fog. Since this exact same thing happened a few weeks ago, I knew that all I needed was a spaceheater to help dry it out.

And yes, I am freely admitting that this is, in fact, the second time this phone has literally been in the toilet. Both times were clean toilets, thankfully. Both times were a result of me thinking it was secure in my jeans' pocket and was horribly mistaken just a little too late. Both times, I felt like a complete and utter idiot.

Also, this is the second phone I dropped down a toilet. My other one was at an airport. Never do that. Just a word of advice.

Anyway, so, I spent the whole afternoon being just a little obsessed with the fact that my phone was not working. I tried to dry it. I kept putting the battery in to see if it was all better. Naturally, it was not. My biggest worry is that I have no landline at home so my cell phone is my only method of contacting the outside world. Well, except for my office phone and the computer. I intended to post on Facebook that my phone was out so if anyone needed me...email, don't call.

Of course, that was when our office network died. When I say died, I mean that the phones went out and our computers couldn't connect to the internet at all.

Now, to most companies, this would be a large inconvenience but there would be ways around it. For us, it was paralyzing. Everything we do is on a network or connected to via an internet connection. Our software needs databases that are off-site to which we network. The documentation I was working on is web-based and so without a working internet connection, I couldn't do anything with it. 100% of my current workload is internet/network based.

I was not the only one. In fact, almost every single person in our company couldn't work. We spent about an hour and a half waiting hopefully for something to get fixed. We socialized which was rather fun, actually. We all kept attempting to connect. There was nothing. We couldn't call out, we couldn't call in.

Normally, I'd be able to update Facebook or read email on my phone but when it takes a dive into the toilet, it sort of puts a damper on that idea. (pun intended).

Thus, I had a perfectly nice, wholly unproductive last hour and a half of work. I won't lie and say it wasn't fun because it was. I got to talk TV, mock the weathermen and discuss tea with my coworkers. We probably could have gone to the exercise room and fought over the fancy elliptical machine or treadmill but I think we were all afraid the network would go back up and we'd be caught slacking.

I think we're all just slightly paranoid at the moment.

Thus it was, I finally left only ten minutes earlier than usual. Because I'm a technology junkie and also because I was afraid I'd really murdered my phone this time, I decided to take a precaution so I bought a pre-paid phone from Target.

I know. I probably could have waited. Yet there was this crushing sense of feeling completely cut-off from the world without having my phone. I knew I had missed a call or two. I had text messages I couldn't read. Naturally, I began to fear for the worst.

It turns out that I hadn't missed much because now my phone is slowly coming back to life. It's drying out in front of my spaceheater and allowing me to make calls. Now I can put the prepaid phone away but keep it for emergencies. For example...if I drop my phone into the toilet again.

Which I hope I don't.

Tomorrow, I'm hoping we're back up and running at work. If not, we'll find ways to amuse ourselves. I think the bosses got their cable TV hooked up on their very large flat screen TV's that they have in their offices. I won't make a comment on that but I'm sure you can imagine how that makes us lowly employees feel. Maybe we'll all flood into their offices so we can amuse ourselves while we're waiting to be able to work again.

Technology. There's no escape.

Happy Thursday.

Finding Wonder in Modern Technology

I'm a little late blogging today. I took the opportunity to grab a couple of extra hours of sleep this morning to catch up from the weekend. I'm feeling a little more awake now and even managed to bring my phone to work today instead of forgetting it or mistaking it for an airline snack.

I was watching TV last night, my normal hour of Jack Bauer on a Monday night and I saw this advertisement for a car. I'm horrible about cars, to be honest. I know what I drive. I sort of know what my friends and family drive but when it comes to identifying, I tend to use terms like "it's blue," or, "it looks like a bar of soap" or "It's boxy". I don't know names of cars very much. So, I can't actually tell you what type of car it was I saw advertised.

I've probably seen this advertisement a few times before and other similar versions of it but last night, I actually watched it properly. This car is scary. Basically, you call out things to it and it does them. You tell it to play a certain CD and the car puts it on. You command it with your voice to do things like turn on the lights, turn up the heat, all kinds of fancy stuff like that.

Nowadays, it's really not that surprising. I mean, we now have technology on our phones or PDA's that allow us to pull up a map and see where we're standing and even to sync up with someone else to see their exact location on the same map.

Seeing this commercial got me thinking. We're living in the future, the shiny sci-fi future that people in the 1950's and earlier could only imagine. When I was watching that car commercial, I suddenly wondered how someone from the early 1950 would feel if they were flash-forwarded to 2009. Back then, they had those cute little cars with the wings on the sides and the most advanced thing you could do with them was step on the accelerator and try to go faster. It was a world in which teenagers used to pin one another with an ACTUAL pin, not some sexual metaphor that it would be today.

Sometimes, I think it would be nice to live in the 1950's. I'm sure there were problems then but I like the fact that it was slower world, one seemingly less jaded. Of course, if I were in the '50's, I'd be a lost cause. I wouldn't be a Bridget Jones-esque singleton searching for her Mr. Right, I'd be a spinster, written off as unmarriable and still living with my parents. Well, maybe. Then again, maybe I wouldn't have been so picky and I would have been married to my high school sweetheart. Maybe I actually would have had a high school sweetheart since I am sort of rewriting history.

Then I do stop and think about the components that make up our lives today. I'm an internet junkie. Living in the 1950's would seriously put a damper on that and if I tried to get someone to invent it, I'd probably be locked up for being crazy. Can you imagine trying to explain to somone in 1950 that in 50 years time we'll be driving around in cars that can do everything but steer themselves (and I'm sure THAT's not far behind)? Can you imagine telling them that everyone has cell phones, even children, that you can order pizza on a computer, that you can order pizza through your Tivo? Actually, can you imagine explaining Tivo? Because then you'd have to explain satellite TV and how you can pick up channels from around the world. I, for one, would rather like to sit Mr. 1950's down in front of, say, TFC (the Filipeno Channel) and the show WoWoWee. Now, talk about a surreal experience. It's a variety show and sometimes they play games. My favourite is "Coca Cola" where they compete for cash and prizes by calling out squares on a screen and seeing what's underneath. Contestants get so excited and they shout "Coca-Cola!" so enthusiastically, they make you want to grab a Coke and shout with them.

I digress. As usual. Anyway, what I'm saying is that in the space of 59 years, our world has evolved. I'm not talking monkey-to-human type evolution but, rather, evolution of life as we once would have known it. It makes me think of "Back to the Future" and the comic books that George McFly would read. They weren't so far off, not really. I'm not dignifying the sequel to that movie, it just wasn't worth it. Yet even since the 1980's, we've gone from super clunky home computers that needed cassette tapes and tape recorders to load games and programs and would crash if you so much as bumped the tape recorder during a load to sleek computers that boot up almost instantly and load everything automatically.

The world is changing constantly. In a few years, I'm sure the technology will exist to put a car on autopilot. After that, they'll figure out how to make cars fly or something like that. Now given my experience with flying over the past weekend, I could get behind that one. It doesn't really matter what the next development will be just that it makes even brand new gadgets obsolete. Technology is changing too quickly; it's an expensive hobby with which to keep up. My iPod mini can attest to that, once my believed music player, now relegated to a glorified external hard drive. What scares me most is the Kindle and other electronic book systems. As an avid reader, I can't get behind that one. I like the smell of a book too much, the feel of the pages, the thrill I get when I pull it off the library shelves. I like to hug a really good book when I'm done and I don't think it would be the same with the Kindle. I get that it means thousands of books at my fingertips but I don't want that. I want to be able to take my time and browse to find my next read in a bookstore or library and feel that excitement when I turn the pages and know that until I turn that last page, it's like I have a friend waiting patiently for me to find time to spend with it. I hope the Kindle isn't going to replace books, that's all I can say.

My point is that so many of the things we use we take for granted. Technology is just there. We forget to view it as a wonder. Taking a mental trip back in time and then attempting to look at what we have today is a great way to appreciate how far we've come, for better or for worse.

Happy Tuesday.