Using Technology

Like I said in my prior post, at this time of the year, there are so many festivities going on. One of them was our company luncheon where I got together with some ladies as others played video games. We got to talking about using Excel to automate our work and one of them said that she saw what I did for someone else and thought it was amazing. (This was the one that reduced time from four hours to minutes – let’s say twentry minutes.) She wants to learn how to do pivot tables.

Yes!!!

I’m hoping once a few learn how to use pivot tables, they’ll start expanding its possibilities to their work and devise other solutions. This may be the nudge that will transform the department out of the heavy manual efforts into fearlessly using simple technology to aid them in their work.

They asked how I learned Excel and I suspect my answer is not very satisfying: I just do it – I just play around with Excel, coming up with ideas of how to use it. I do read a lot, borrowing ideas from books, but I also take the time, late at night, to put in some new approaches to making Excel do my work. And I’ve been doing this naturally since I first began working.

It was just something I did. Maybe it’s a mindset of curiosity and exploration and creativity and problem solving. I don’t know why I do it and others don’t. I’m hoping this nudge will be similar to a tiny mote inducing a cascade of precipitation or particles: a little nudge precipitating into many ideas of uses.

To me it’s a simple thing: you just go out and play with the software, especially one that allows you to do a lot of stuff and do a do-over.

I’m hoping the interest will be a nudge similar to a tiny mote inducing a cascade of precipitation of particles: a little nudge precipitating into many ideas of uses.

Then the topic got really interesting, into the topic of technology today versus before we had the Internet – the real point of this post. One of the ladies asked, “How did we make plans to get together without the iPhone? I don’t even remember.” That’s the interesting point: things have changed so much that it can be difficult to remember how we actually used to do things. It’s really mindboggling how much has changed in the last 10+ years. Now we walk around with technology in our pocket, with instant connection to knowledge via the Internet and Google. I grew up without all of that.

It’s amazing how we survived without the ready and easy access to all of this information. Now, if I want to figure out how to do something, I start off by Googling. Technology related questions lend themselves very nicely to Googling – you’re less likely to run into “fake news”. But I do test out general life questions via Googling too, but I use multiple search engines to see what the general consensus is.

As an aside, there may be pockets of the US that still do not have internet available to everyone. I’m thinking maybe in the deeply rural areas that might still be without electricity. I thought I read somewhere that there’s a few areas, dwindling in numbers now, that still do not have electricity. And no electricity means no internet.

Anyway, the conversation around technology led to speculation on how different the children of today will be when they start working. The world will be so unrecognizable from the one we grew up in.

And then a few days later, an article appeared about the longing for landlines that fits into our conversation. (In case you do not have a log in account with New York Times, here’s a link to another site that posted the article.) It’s a remarkable coincidence that this article appears a few days after our conversation, but maybe people around the world are marveling at how different everything has become in the last 10+ years. And maybe some of the older ones are wondering if we lost something in the rush to deploy technology.

“This is a lament for the landline, a rhapsody for its dial tone, a hymn for the way it connected people. It’s the little things we miss. The landline was a focal point of the home, an antidote to atomization and loneliness, those scourges of our age.”
New York Times, “A Longing for the Lost Landline”, Roger Cohen, December 20, 2019

The author described a “lost age” that was really just 10 to 20 years ago. The author talked about how you had to structure your days in order to make plans and you had to commit to those plans. You had to make plans face to face or by phone at home because there were no phones to carry with you when you are out of the house. It was really a completely different world, quite possibly a bygone age, although I lived through it, just 10 to 20 years ago.

And this paragraph stood out to me the most, the fact that we may have lost the down time to explore, to dream, to imagine. Basically, the down time we need to rejuvenate and innovate. To contemplate and understand.

“In the landline world, there was down time. You left the house, you looked around, you saw people, you daydreamed, you got lost, you found your way again, you gazed from the train window at lines of poplars swaying in the mist. Time drifted. It was not raw material for the extraction of productivity. It stretched away, an empty canvas.”
New York Times, “A Longing for the Lost Landline”, Roger Cohen, December 20, 2019