A New Century

Well, I didn’t get to do any internet browsing while we were in Susanville. Bill no longer has a wireless router and that’s the only way I can connect. I don’t have a telephone connection number for the Hughes satellite service; something I should get and keep filed away. Either that or I should buy a cheap wireless router to carry with me.

So, what’s ‘connected’?

For me, it’s using the power of the computer and the internet to gather and share information. It means not using the newspaper and the telephone for those activities. It means 21^st century versus the 20^th century.

At times; no, most times…I feel as if I am on a different planet than the one I used to inhabit. I’m sure it was because of my job, working with the aptly named Strategic Development Department of PCG. Strategic meant that our work was important. Development was the creation of ideas and then transforming those ideas into reality by the gathering of great amounts of information that was related to the project at hand.

Our computers and the internet connections were a vital part of what we did. Tools. I could depend on being connected to the rest of our department almost 24/7. Share an idea? Sure thing! It didn’t matter where the members of this department were scattered to during the business week, we were still ‘connected’. Files were transferred, messages sent and received from one side of the country to the other and all in mere seconds.

All this activity was considered normal. And part of our development work was to find even better and faster methods to do this kind of information retrieval and sharing. Our goal was to have information shared at every level throughout the company. The jobsite foreman was going to be able to enter data into a wireless device that would connect to the corporate servers and then be available for the CFO to look at, all within seconds.

Hardware; new computers, cell phones, routers and switches, modems, etc. were all a part of our everyday lives. I remember getting 3 new computers one year; just to try them out and to see how well they performed while traveling. I also remember being asked if I wanted a fourth computer and saying, “no thanks.” And during those travels; it was connectivity that was considered most important at a hotel, not the quality of the mattress. Yes, that was normal for me.

Software was constantly in development and we all had various beta versions of this program or that one on our computers. We worked with programmers and development teams daily. Part of our job was to find needs for new software. We were supposed to look for problems that needed a software solution.

Now, on this new planet that I inhabit, most citizens are quite content to live their lives as if this were the 20^th century…heck, maybe even the 19^th! Some will check their e-mail once a week. That’s if they check it at all. Hello? Not one realizes that their e-mail can be forwarded automatically to their cell phones. Outlook is only an opinion and not software to them. Oh, for the ‘good old days”...of the 21^st century!