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Monday, August 21, 2006

 

Modern Contradiction

For someone who works in a profession usually considered “high-tech”, I seem to have an unconventional aversion to certain technological advances.

I met up with an old friend the other day and was greatly surprised to find that he was on time. Incidentally he had left his cell phone with someone else the night before and was uncontactable outside of his home. This meant that he had no way of letting me know if he would be late, thus compelling him to be punctual.

This harks back to the (good old?) days before cell phones, when even pagers were newfangled thingys that people clipped onto their belts to look important. Appointments were made at least a day in advance and people actually kept to the agreed timings, lest they should incur the wrath of those who had to wait. Of course, some people had already cultivated the habit of non-punctuality by then, but by and large most of us still felt some form of obligation to be on time rather than to simply send a text message informing the other parties about our predicted lateness. To this day I’m still a bit of a stickler for punctuality, but tolerance remains my policy (sigh) since I wouldn’t have many friends left if I were to be anal about it.

Another technological advancement I’ve come to distrust in the workplace is email. Somehow or rather, sending emails to people to get things done only works if they actually read their email and even if they do, it has little staying power in a person’s memory (myself included). Of course we have phones, but me being the eccentric sort I never liked talking over the phone, which might explain why I never had much luck with the ladies in those days when talking on the phone for a minimum of X hours a day was a mandatory stage of courtship. Maybe it still is, I don’t know.

So how do I get things done or information extracted then? I do the unthinkable.







I ask them. Face to face.

Usually it’s a short walk across the office or the shopfloor (the part of the manufacturing plant where all the machines are), and ironically it’s faster than it would take for someone to reply to an email.

The best part is that it actually works.

In an age where fixing a car needs a masters in electrical/software engineering rather than a penchant for greasy hands, I am perhaps a rare oddity (among my peers, at least). I don’t trust a computer in any car I drive to save my life apart from ABS. I prefer the purr and roar of vacuum tube amplifiers to the grind and squeal of solid state ones. I still like the feel of holding newspapers in my hands. I don’t need 2000 channels on my TV (heck, I don’t even watch the damned thing apart from soccer and playing music DVDs). I hope the day never comes when I have to tote a Blackberry around and be enslaved to email wherever I go.

I am the antediluvian technologist.

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