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Pardon me Boys, but I'm going to Digress
A while ago, I took a brief excursion to Chattanooga, TN. If you don't know where that is, it's close to the Georgia-Tennessee border and home to many tourist attractions. Chattanooga's downtown area has been through a huge reconstruction project, and there are many sites to see. I visited plenty of places including the Tennessee Aquarium, the Chattanooga Choo-Choo, and Hamilton Place Mall.
During the day, I am a normal tourist, armed with a camera, sunglasses, plaid shorts, and all (Ok, maybe I didn't go that far in touristdom). But by night, at my hotel ...
I am the computer road warrior. I have it all - the Windows 9x-based laptop computer. The spare uncharged battery. The PCMCIA modem card. The detachable mouse. Microsoft Word is loaded so I can write. I have Internet connectivity installed, such as Dial-Up Networking and Netscape Navigator. The computer magazines that I can scan while waiting for a webpage to download are just waiting for my perusal. I have everything the road warrior needs. I am 100% ready to access the Internet and see pictures of all of the places that I have already visited earlier today.
But I forgot the phone number to my Internet provider. Oops.
See, my Internet service provider has points of access in just about the entire state of Tennessee. There are not many places in this region that I can go without receiving toll-free Internet access. The only problem is that I don't know the Chattanooga dial-in number to my Internet service provider, and of course they are closed for the night.
But wait - don't I have the phone numbers written in my personal organizer that I take everywhere? Forgot to bring it. But wait, don't I have the phone number in my electronic organizer? Didn't bring that, either. Aren't the numbers available in a convenient folder on my laptop? No. Seems that I didn't bring anything that holds phone numbers, period.
Life teaches us lessons. One of those lessons is that neither the best electronic gadgetry nor the most advanced systems of personal organization can make up for basic human incompetence. We continue to spend hundreds of dollars on organizers, personal information managers, laptop computers, electronic telephone number storage devices, personal digital assistants, and other gadgets and gizmos. Yet, if we forget to take them, they are utterly useless.
Makes you think, doesn't it? We don't trust our memory enough to remember phone numbers, yet we 'trust' our memory enough to bring the devices that do our remembering for us. Maybe it's time to work on improving our memories instead of working on buying fancier devices to hold our thoughts for us. Maybe it's just time to go back to old-fashioned sticky notes. Or maybe it's time to ... well, I forgot.
Article copyright 1999 Andrew Malek - All Rights Reserved. This article may not be redistributed without permission of Andrew Malek. All trademarks mentioned in this article are owned by their respective companies.
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