Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

Several years ago I worked for a guy who was what I considered to be at the top of his game professionally and technically. He was busy, taking important meetings, doing technical and sales work. He had a cell phone, a pager, a laptop -- which at that time was pretty technically ahead of the curve.

One day as we were driving to a pre-sales technical meeting he told me something I'll never forget. He asked me, "do you want to know the first thing I'm going to do if we make it big with this company?" I said that I was interested. He said, "I'm going to throw away my phone, my pager and my laptop and I'm going to avoid technology for the rest of my life."

I thought that was rather odd considering the field and business we were in. He continued to explain that he thinks that we've all become too connected. We have so little actual personal time because we can take and make calls anytime from anywhere. We're never more than a phone call or a page or an email away. This, he said, can be a good thing because it can help us to stay safe and keep us in touch with our families and friends. He pointed out that the unfortunate downside is that our vendors and our clients and our bosses and our co-workers have all increased their expectations of our availability. And we've been trained to think that if we turn off our phone, our client will switch to another vendor because that vendor is more available than we.

After a week like this one, I tend to agree with my old friend. This week my server has been completely bogged down and unstable. I haven't been able to have any fun blogging because I've been fighting the technology and since my server is used for other business ventures, I can't just let it die. Ug.

So, when I hit it big, you can be pretty sure I'm at least going to offload the management of all this stuff. More likely I'll be like my old friend and get rid of as much of it as possible.