Business, Media, Technology, Uncategorized, work

Blessed Relief

18 Comments

My typical work day consists of seeing clients in therapy, doing formal psychological testing, consulting with other staff, going to meetings, doing paperwork, writing reports, answering and sending work-related emails, and taking care of whatever else my work place might throw at me.

In the midst of all this, I keep tabs on what is happening on my phone and my private laptop that I also have at work.  (I also check the  Blog for activity). My children and Husband are frequent texters. The main job for my private laptop is to provide Bluetooth connections to my sound bar so that I can listen to Classical MPR whenever I have a free moment while I do paperwork.

Throughout the day I also keep track of all the emails I get from the Regulatory Board of which I am the chair.  I can’t deal with the emails that arise when I am working, since that would be frowned upon, even though what I do on the Board is officially State business, and I am a State employee.  I understand the reasoning for this.

I typically get 10-20 emails from the Regulatory Board office each day.  I take care of them in the evening when I get home from work. There was a flurry of activity this morning, and then, blessed quiet this afternoon. I figured out that our Board secretary is taking a four day weekend to go camping.  What a relief!

I wish I were not so tied to my technology. As I read what I just wrote, I can’t believe I do all the things I just described. This just can’t be healthy!

How tied are you to technology? How do you set limits on it and on yourself?

18 thoughts on “Blessed Relief”

  1. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    This topic makes me anxious just considering my dependence on tech. During the last month I had to buy a new MacBook Air due to my old one (6 years old) starting to malfunctions at critical times. This was poorly timed, but I must say that I really got a lot of reliable performance from the old MacBookAir. I left behind an earlier model at my old business that is still operable.

    I also purchased a new iPod touch to support my audio habits–music and audiobooks. My phone needs to be replaced, but that has to wait, so I support its ever weaker battery with an exterior battery.

    I am so dependent on these items that it scares me. I resent the dependence sometimes, yet I love the convenience of a phone that takes pictures, transferring money and paying bills on-line, and researching a topic of interest to me from my front patio.

    Sometimes I feel like a technology toddler–completely dependent on a parent-device and defiant about the fact that I need it so much, so I take off running in another direction until I hit my own tech-less limits.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

  3. More tied to it than I want to be (life was so much simpler before computers). But it’s a tool that can be used for good or evil, just like most tools. I can’t imagine writing books without a word processor! I’d still be hunting, pecking, whiting out, rinsing, and repeating my FIRST book . . . and I started that almost 10 years ago! 😦

    I also like computers and the internet for accessing information quickly and doing more business and communicating. The paradox to me is that computers simultaneously SAVE us a ton of time, but allow us to do so much more that we end up WASTING more time on activities we didn’t know we “needed” to be doing 20 years ago.

    Chris in O-town

    *BSP* IF you’re looking for a fun day trip this weekend, come on down to Austin MN for the Austin ArtWorks Festival. Visual arts, authors, food, music, kids activities, all in downtown Austin.

    I’ll be giving a presentation titled “Everything you always wanted to know about writing a novel but were afraid to ask,” Sunday at 1:00 at Sweet Reads Books. Two other authors of note will be speaking too–Allen Eskens and William Kent Krueger. Here’s the website link to check out all the activities: http://www.austinareaarts.org/schedule

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Wow, Chris, that is impressive–I wish it was closer. I hope the talk attracts many people. You could record it on a device and send it to all of us, thus increasing our dependence per our topic!

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

  4. Pish. Limits? I don’t have no stinking limits. I’m totally addicted.
    Technology is great! When it works!

    The other day I was at my fancy lighting console at the college. Refreshing my memory and updating software. I was trying to do a simple command to set up a way to check the lights in order to make sure no lamps are burned out. But it wouldn’t accept what I was typing in. So I pulled up the manual. I follow the directions and it works. I try it again and it doesn’t work. I go back to the manual and do it again. Works. Try it again and it doesn’t work.
    What the heck. Manual open, works. Close manual, doesn’t work. Grrrr. I even took a picture of my command line when it worked to compare against when it doesn’t work. Sure looks to be the same thing! And then I’m trying to record all this to a single button, called a ‘Macro’ to make it quick and easy. That wasn’t working either.
    I turned it off in frustration and went home.

    The next day I turned it on. Typed in command and it worked. I tried the macro and it worked. And the next time I tried it it DOESN’T WORK! Honestly…if it wasn’t so frustrating it would be maddening. It is maddening when things work intermittently.
    Even tractor repairs or car issues; tracing a problem that’s only intermittent is far harder than something that is just ‘broke’.

    Back to technology. I love having the smart phone.
    My 93yr old mom has decided to text all us kids in the mornings to let us know she’s up and OK. But the first few days with one sister teaching her how to text, it was pretty funny.
    But God Bless her – my mom’s never been too afraid to try new things.

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    2. I have those kind of issues too….I have a script that I wrote to launch iTunes every morning and wake me up to music. Over time, though, when the computer starts up it doesn’t always make the internet connection and I get a iTunes error message and silence. If it NEVER worked, it might be fixable. But sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and I can’t figure out why.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  5. Husband is fanatical about never letting his cell phone battery get too low. He was afraid if the battery got completely down to zero he would lose all the information stored on the phone. We have educated him on this, but he still doesn’t quite trust it.

    Thurber had some funny essays about his relatives getting used to automobiles and lightbulbs.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  8. Wish I was at the State Fair – if it’s anything like here, beautiful day for it.

    At one point our computer lived in an upstairs room, and I wasn’t as addicted to email and Facebook when I had to climb stairs each time I wanted to use it. And like Steve, with no smart phone I can’t get addicted there. We do now have a laptop too, which helps when one person is on for too long.

    I have recently learned how to use Google Docs, in order to share information as we plan a fall book sale… Just when you think you’ve got it, some glitch happens and the learning curve gets steeper.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  10. I was in a coffeeshop and did an informal count of the customers. Of the 23 people who were in the shop when I got my coffee:

    14 were on laptops
    1 was using a tablet
    1 was reading an actual book
    3 were on phones
    and 4 were having personal conversations.

    It’s sort of tempting to think that if there were no modern technology they’d all be having personal conversations, or reading. But perhaps it’s also possible there would only be four people engaged in conversation, and one reading a book, and the rest might be just lost in their own private distractions without the aid of technology.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.