"In my day…"
“Back in my day, we chipped our ice cubes off the side walk — and we liked it!”
If today has anything to prove to the masses of parents out there who have turned to their children for help setting up the household wireless router, it’s that even guys who get technology experience the occasional technical migraine.
Like most, we here at Tech Guys rely on a CRM (we use Salesforce) to manage and organize all kinds of things, from projects, to calendars, to training materials, to time logs. Salesforce tracks all kinds of stuff for us, and reminds us when we’re supposed to do it. It is probably the single most important piece of software to our company, and this morning it broke.
With scheduled tasks and meetings and calendar events suddenly removed from everyone’s docket at Tech Guys, it seemed a good time to post about the reliance so many of us have on technology today. Many of us have often heard our parents, grandparents or crabby uncles utter some cliche phrase like, “Back in my day, we chipped our ice cubes off the side walk — and we liked it!” As if complaining that the ice-maker shot out too many cubes at a time was a spoiled-child kind of thing to say.
Of course, there are some anti-technologists out there who see these kinds of events as just cause to live in a cave forever. And while I am sometimes shocked and disturbed that I no longer remember even a quarter of the phone numbers I used to have in my head as a 12 year old, I’m also not about to cast aside the convenience of checking on a live Colts score on my phone between playing points of ultimate frisbee. And in light of salesforce breaking, I’m not about to invest in reams of paper and ball point pens. My office isn’t big enough for another filing cabinet.
I guess I find the occasional breakages and headaches worth the conveniences of improved technology. At the same time, though, I’m sure I’ll still be one of those crotchety grandpas who says to my grand children, “In my time, we called ’em video games, and it was all we could do to flail our arms around and hope for the best.” Thank you Nintendo Wii. May you someday collect dust in my attic as a fossil of the “millenial days.”