John O’Donohue quoted in the Points to Ponder column of the September 2000 issue of the Reader’s Digest, said, “E-mail is like coming home at night after a long day and finding 70 people in your kitchen.”
I will never forget my mother’s many pen-friends around the world. Through her long association in Guiding and the Brownie movement, she was able to make friends the world over. She treasured her many pen-friends in New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, the Philippines, England, and Africa. One of her friends was married to a prison guard who worked at the penitentiary in Alice Springs, right in the middle of the most unforgiveable desert in the world–the middle of Australia. She considered her friend in New Zealand almost a sister. They shared many of the same thoughts and beliefs. It was a blow to her when she learned that her friend had passed away. She always wanted to travel to New Zealand, but never made it during her lifetime. She did travel to Hawaii, which was one of her most fondly remembered holidays, and was able to meet her pen-friend there, face-to-face.
The reason I mention all this is the fact that when she was communicating with her friends around the world she had to rely on those little blue airmail forms we all remember. In one of those little blue forms she was able to condense her thoughts and feelings and to make a contact with a person on the other side of the planet that would last a lifetime. I was always amazed at how succinct she needed to be to fit in all she wanted to communicate with her friends.
…It would have been so much easier had there been such a thing as a personal computer or a cellphone with text messaging capabilities in her time. Her communication took, on average, a week to arrive at their destinations, and another week or so before she received a reply.
Connections.. In this world, we are all connected. In this technological age it is so easy to make contact with someone. All you need is an e-mail address, and a computer or cellphone. Text messaging has made instant communication that much easier. I always think what her life would have been like had she the capability for instant communications with her friends all over the world. In her world, the only virus she had to contend with might have been a head cold.
“You can send a message around the world in one-fifth of a second, yet it may take years for it to get from the outside of a man’s head to the inside.”
A quote from Charles F. Kettering, and quoted in the Points to Ponder column of the November 1993 issue of the Reader’s Digest magazine.
When my radio network first went on the air, we constructed a website for it. It was nothing fancy, just a page or two of information and a way to contact me. One of my network producers in Vancouver would sift through the mail every day, delete the ads and other spam, ensure I wasn’t getting a virus, and then forward the mail off to me. I tried to answer as many of the e-mails that I could each and every day, conscious of the fact that I needed to research and write a show for broadcast that night. Occasionally a virus would sneak its way through and my system would crash. Do you remember the “I Love You” virus? I got one from an old boss at the time. I knew this had to be a bug…
I’ve always had a very capable tech close to where I live who has always been able to handle my virus issues. Sometimes, though, even he was baffled by a particularly virulent bug. There were times I lost a pile of unanswered mail in the process. Sometimes he was able to save everything.
Has your computer ever burst into flames? Mine did about a year back. Who knows what happened, but when I attempted to boot up the computer in my home office, it sparked and caught on fire. Even with backups, I needed this system up and running every day. This computer is my livelihood. I called my tech and he took the machine in right away, and within a few days worked his magic. Those were the longest few days I can remember.
He had saved most of everything, but I think I lost some of the mail. Since I work out of my home office, and not in a large workplace, I need to bring the computer to my tech’s shop. If I worked at the company, I no doubt would have had an IT person at my work station within minutes. In my real world, I’ve always had to contend with traffic and stop lights, and the hope that he was in his business, and not out on another call.
I am the “entire” staff of my radio show. My wife helps out as much as she can, but in the end the buck stops with me. I spend the better part of my day just researching and preparing these programs for broadcast each night. My son is also a rep goalie on a “AA” team and we travel a lot now. It may take me some time to respond to an e-mail, so please be patient with me. Be assured that each and every e-mail is important to me. It’s the way we make contact after a show that has left some kind of positive or emotional impression on you. I will write to you just as soon as I can.
I always try to ensure that I answer each and every e-mail that arrives concerning the show, but there have been some that have been most likely lost to extremely nasty viruses that my anti-virus software missed, and the fire. I wanted to take this blog to apologize to you if, after sending me an e-mail, you never heard back from me. Your e-mail may have been lost during one of these times. I truly am sorry for this. There have been other times when I go back through my inbox, and find one that was never opened. I can’t tell you why it was missed, it just was, but I always responded. Again, I feel terrible for this mistake, for temporarily misplacing the most important e-mail of them all–the one I missed reading when it arrived–yours..
My mother’s little blue airmail form and my old electric typewriter have always looked appealing during times of trouble.
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Don Jackson
It is wonderfully terrifying to think of how technology has changed our lives–for the better, and, at times, for the worse. When I was growing up, nobody had ever heard of an ATM, cellular phones (if you were one of the privedged few to have one!) required their own battery pack which was carried in its’ own ‘backpack’, and computers took up an entire room or two. I wonder what the future of technology holds for us all…
- NancyIt’s not that I’m ‘knocking’ technology–I met my husband [who lives in North Carolina] via the Internet! And I’m off to see him on Saturday for two glorious weeks! So technology has definitely changed my life!!
Nancy