Synchronicity: the experience of two or more occurrences (beyond coincidentally) in a manner that is logically meaningful- but inexplicable- to the person or persons experiencing them.
I am a PC Network Support Person by trade. Over the ten plus years I have been doing this, the world of hardware and software has increasingly become a house of cards. One application’s functionality leans on other applications, until you cannot make a change to one without breaking another, or several others. E-mail, once a novelty, then a luxury, has become a mission-critical necessity. The users of these systems have, it seems to me, become increasingly petulant and bitchy when things are not working perfectly. This is not a perfect world. I do not know if they are looking for a scapegoat for lack of productivity, or an excuse to stop their furious pace for a moment, but I do know they are less likely to find another way, or find something else to do than they were in the past.
I don’t know anymore if the Blackberries and the PDAs of the world are making us more productive, or just making us busy all the time. A VP of Sales recently told me that he liked his Blackberry because he could (for example) read his e-mail while sitting in a parking lot, waiting for his wife to come out of the pharmacy. My initial reaction was to think, “Get a dime novel and a life!” I just today expressed these misgivings to my boss, wondering if we were fooling ourselves into thinking we were accomplishing so much just because we were so busy.
Then I saw this post on Edge of Faith blog.
Red pill, Blue pill, or Black Capsule? Extra points for knowing the origin of the third choice.
I am a PC Network Support Person by trade. Over the ten plus years I have been doing this, the world of hardware and software has increasingly become a house of cards. One application’s functionality leans on other applications, until you cannot make a change to one without breaking another, or several others. E-mail, once a novelty, then a luxury, has become a mission-critical necessity. The users of these systems have, it seems to me, become increasingly petulant and bitchy when things are not working perfectly. This is not a perfect world. I do not know if they are looking for a scapegoat for lack of productivity, or an excuse to stop their furious pace for a moment, but I do know they are less likely to find another way, or find something else to do than they were in the past.
I don’t know anymore if the Blackberries and the PDAs of the world are making us more productive, or just making us busy all the time. A VP of Sales recently told me that he liked his Blackberry because he could (for example) read his e-mail while sitting in a parking lot, waiting for his wife to come out of the pharmacy. My initial reaction was to think, “Get a dime novel and a life!” I just today expressed these misgivings to my boss, wondering if we were fooling ourselves into thinking we were accomplishing so much just because we were so busy.
Then I saw this post on Edge of Faith blog.
Red pill, Blue pill, or Black Capsule? Extra points for knowing the origin of the third choice.
I just went for an hourlong walkabout through those links..awesome reminder of what I am supposed to be writing about.
ReplyDeleteWe are getting busier communicating trivia, porn and entertainment at the expense of solving real problems. Technology is a double edged sword that miraculously allows valuable information to be shared as much as it completely wastes our time.
Like everything else too much of a good thing is bad. The upside is that the genies are all getting released from the bottles faster than they can be edited.
GIGO redux!
You've just been tagged with a Thinking Blogger Award from Philaletheia!
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