Fed Up With Technology

I'm turning back into a Luddite! That's right, a Luddite. Those people who hate anything technological. To think that I would be blogging or running a virtual company using my computer would have been unimaginable to me around this time 14 years ago when I about to graduate from college.

I wanted to become a writer, and back then journalists and reporters still didn't rely on computers for word processing all that much. Fortunately, I had a PR professor who made a wise decision. She told me that I had turn in my senior thesis in PR would only be accepted on a floppy disk. She said, "Carolyn, if I let you graduate without being computer literate, I will have failed as an educator!" When you want something badly enough, you learn and quickly. With my sister as my guide, I learned WordPerfect - well enough to get that final paper written and saved to a floppy. I graduated on time, too.

Flash forward to 1995, I was working for my first dot.com. Dr. Kay Felkins, if you're out there reading this, thanks! Back then Luddite was the catch phrase throughout the industry for people unwilling to embrace this thing called the Internet. It clearly explains why I'm I'm dropping out of technology. Besides the fact that I simply don't want to be accessble to anyone 24/7, I just hate when technology backfires. Here's what happened to me today.

I went to see Dr. Evil, like usual, at 9 am in the 7th arrondisement. From there, I hopped on the Line 14 toward Bercy to meet my favorite Scottish client, Susie Hollands of Bonapart Consulting.
I had a few moments to kill, so I was sitting in the Café Bercy jotting down some blog entries. Then it occurred to me - my Palm died while I was in Dr. Evil's office. Susie's phone number and office door code where in my address book.

I'm lazy. I still haven't transferred all of my contacts to my cell phone (shame on me because I certainly know how), but who has time to that? I call up my husband in a panic. He's gotten used to these mid-day phone calls. I ask him to go to Susie's web site to see if he can locate her phone number so I can call her. No luck because only her company email address and contact form are present. Luckily, I have memorized her personal address, so I have my husband to send her an urgent email. She didn't see it because she's in the kitchen making tea. We're set to have our PR meeting in a matter of minutes.

Two minutes later my phone rings. It's my husband. He googled Susie and found her phone number by only the Lord knows where! I call her up and she says, "Hey, darlin' where are you?" I tell her that I'm downstairs. I explain what happened. She gives me the door code, we go on with our three hour meeting. Thanks to Philippe's quick thinking, crisis has been averted! I hate rescheduling meetings - especially if I'm already at the meeting place.

Now as I think about this, maybe I not ready to return to Luddite status just yet. After all, it was technology, with a little help from my husband, that saved the day!