Is technology making you shoddy?

While IT is a great boon for all of us, there are times when our reliance on it makes us poor planners and in the long run, we have only ourselves to blame for the mess we land into

Is technology making you shoddy?

While IT is a great boon for all of us, there are times when our reliance on it makes us poor planners and in the long run, we have only ourselves to blame for the mess we land into

Some have called me a bit of a Luddite because I don't carry a mobile and don't use social networking sites (I'm not really much of a people person), but there are a variety of technologies that I rely on. I cannot live without the Web and I don't remember the last time I went into a bank in order to withdraw money who does that when you have an ATM card?

And, like anybody who relies heavily on technology, I too have had my share of difficulties difficulties for which we initially blame technology. But, end of the day, one has to realise that it is not technology that is at fault. Here are three examples:u00a0

Too late!

This happened almost exactly a decade ago, in New Delhi. I had got my first ATM card because it was so convenient to withdraw money using this after sunset an excellent option in a hot city like Delhi. Once, when I was visiting my parents down South, I visited an ATM at midnight to withdraw money and the machine was out like the proverbial light.

Initially I blamed the ATM, but my friend who drove me to the ATM asked me why I put it off till the last minute. And that was when I realised that I should have withdrawn cash at least a day in advance. Fortunately for me, the ATM worked after half an hour which was great for me because I had a train to catch at around 7 AM the next day!

No signal

The reliance on the mobile means that we do many things at the last minute. This happened this year in April, when we were visiting the famous temple of Cheluvunarayanaswamy in Melukote, which is hailed as the Badri of the South. Me and dad were supposed to meet somebody in Melukote somebody who, like us, was leaving from another part of Bangalore.

Instead of planning ahead, we decided to call from Melukote. This small town has mobile base stations, but that day, around 70,000 people landed up, causing massive signal disruption. It took us ages to make the call, and we realised that we should have fixed the meeting location in Bangalore itself on our landlines.

Instinct saver

This happened to a journalist friend who wanted to go home and work on a story. She mailed the story to her personal e-mail ID and decided to read her mail from home and then work on it. I don't know what made me do it, but I told her to have a backup by taking the story on a thumb drive.

She did this, and thanked me profusely the next day apparently, while she was happily working on her home PC with the file on her memory stick, her husband was cursing the Internet because he wanted to log in and couldn't. Had my friend not taken the USB drive, she would never have finished the story because the Net connection was never established that night.

Clearly, a file on a floppy that works is worth ten on the Web that doesn't!

QUICK TAKE
>>We tend to depend too much on technology
>>Sometimes, this can boomerang
>>Then, it is not technology's fault, but ours

Just missed one letter
It's wise to remember how easily email this wonderful technology can be misused, sometimes unintentionally, with serious consequences.

Consider the case of the Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email.

Unfortunately, when typing her address, he missed one letter, and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her email, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint.

At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:
Dearest Wife,
Just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow.
PS: Sure is hot down here.
Source: www.computerjokes.net