A Lesson Learned

by Fran McNabb

NOTE: Posts on the first Thursday of the month are usually written by Victoria Johnson. She has asked me to fill in for the October, November and December blogs. I am honored to help her out.

Technology is a wonderful thing. I keep telling myself that even when it drives me completely insane. I love my computer and am on it way too much. My old computer is trying to go out so I bought another one and have yet to conquer all the differences. Being "untechy" and not wanting to deal with getting my new computer ready to use, I look at it, close it, and go back to my old computer and decide I’ll deal with the new one later.

Phones can be just as frustrating. While on vacation in Fort Lauderdale, I woke up one morning to find my phone completely dead even though it had been plugged in all night. I panicked.  I was expected at my DIL’s house and had no way to contact her except from the hotel lobby phone, but once I got there I realized I didn’t know her cell phone number nor anyone else’s except my husband’s. He was on a boat in the Atlantic fishing and I knew he was skeptical about answering a number he didn’t know. Luckily the lady at the front desk let me use a phone and my husband answered and had my son text his wife.

Long story, short, it took three hours for my DIL and I to figure out it was my charger gone bad and not my phone. That was a relief, but in the process I learned a lesson. Today we take for granted the ease at which the computer, the internet, and cell phones make our lives so much better, but I think we rely on them way too much. I made a vow to write down all of my important contacts and their cell numbers in case something like this happened again. We no longer have telephone books for cell phone numbers nor do most of us memorize phone numbers. (Gosh, I still remember the 7-digit phone numbers of my childhood friends.) I feel much more connected knowing I can rely on a paper list of my important contacts. Do you have one?

Now that I have my phone working again, a list of emergency numbers stashed away in my purse, and a new computer I've almost conquered, I can sit back and enjoy this tech-21st Century and pretend I understand it and am part of it!

 

FRAN MCNABB grew up along the Gulf Coast and writes sweet romances sometimes set along the coast. Her newest book, A SOLDIER’S HONOR http://a.co/d/cJ6y5U8, is set on the Gulf Coast as well. She and her husband live on a bayou harbor and enjoy the activities and beauty of the water. 
Visit Fran at www.FranMcNabb.com

Technology – Friend and Foe

 Since the development of the personal computer in the mid 1980s, I have been half in love and half at a loss about technology.

At the time, my employer was one of the first to embrace the computer as a word-processor that took over from the once brilliantly advanced golf-ball IBM typewriter as my favorite acquisition. Not long after learning how to use the 3.5” floppy disk for my workplace BBC (I was living in Cardiff at the time), we invested in a Sanyo dual 5.25” floppy disk PC on which my husband transcribed his doctoral thesis. My own set of floppy disks held chapters from some of my early manuscripts.

Shortly afterwards, my brother sent me 5.25” floppies with programs to load onto my hard drive – the only problem? My Sanyo ran programs in one floppy disk drive and saved to the second floppy disk drive, holding information somewhere in something called ‘memory’.  Within a few years, the technical world had leapt light years ahead and we were still in dot matrix mode.

Barely six years before, I had written my Masters Degree dissertation on a typewriter on cotton rag paper and a carbon copy, pecking one letter at a time to avoid any errors that meant re-typing the whole page because corrections were unacceptable. This collection became my first publication in hardcover. A few decades later my second hardcover book, a novel, had been written on a laptop and sent over the wireless network of the Internet from my home in Wales to my publisher New York.

The progress is ceaseless and I have recently confessed that I no longer use the myriad of notebooks I possess, preferring to take notes on my phone in a program that can be accessed from my tablet as well as my laptop and is held in that space somewhere called “cloud computing”. And strangely, my laptop has a solid-state (no moving parts) hard drive but no floppy disk drive nor a DVD/CD player. The programs (applications) I have added have come from “the cloud” – where ever that is – and I do not have them in any tangible form.

All of these developments make for equipment and activities that are beyond our comprehension and our control. What is convenient about my cloud note-keeping also makes me vulnerable to the failure of the entity where is it stored or the entity that has provided the program I use. If by some act of sabotage or Deus Machina, the bank of storage disks my provider uses is disabled, I will have lost all my work.

Yet, the lack of security is outclassed by the convenience. We innately trust progress, even though the original copy of my husband’s thesis is no longer accessible as the floppy disk has been superseded by the flash drive which has now been superseded by cloud-computing. In order to reproduce my dissertation, I would need to transcribe it from the printed copy.

There are always prices to pay for moving ahead. Change is embraced and resisted in equal measure. Making the most without losing the best is a balance we achieve by due diligence and thoughtful consideration. 

Embracing the future does not require that we must shun the past.

Feeling Naked - No Phone

by Fran McNabb

On my way to a doctor’s appointment this morning, I realized I’d forgotten my cell phone. No

big deal, right? Wrong. I wasn’t going far, just a couple of miles, but I felt vulnerable, and yes, naked.

 

What would I do if I had car trouble? Flat tire? A wreck? What if I stopped at the grocery store on my way home? How would I call my husband to see if he’d thought of something else we needed?

My mind spun. I felt alone. I thought about going back to the house to get the phone, but I didn’t want to be late so I moved along with the slow flow of traffic. I arrived at the doctor’s office a few minutes early, checked in, then took my seat along with the four other people waiting for their names to be called.

 

The first thing I did was to reach into my purse for my phone, but alas, I remembered I didn’t have it with me. I looked at the others in the lobby, but no one acknowledged me. How could they? All of them had their heads down looking at their cell phones.

 

I wanted to giggle. This little waiting room wasn’t just a doctor’s lobby. It was a tiny slice of the world around us, made up of people living and working alongside of others, but most of the time isolating themselves from the masses around them.

 We’ve become a nation dependent on technology. The cell phone is just one of the pieces of technology that has become a necessary part of our lives. Is that a bad thing? Certainly not. I could write for pages about how the phone has made our lives easier, but not today. Today as I think about the waiting room, I wonder how many lives we’ve neglected to see around us because we were so engrossed in our emails, texts, and internet.

 When the nurse called my name, I picked up my purse, smiled to the young man who actually looked up when I stood. I realized if I had had my phone, I would’ve been just like them—isolated and much too involved in a tiny piece of technology to see those around me.

After my appointment, I didn’t stop at the store. I rushed home and the first thing I did was to locate my phone. I didn’t like feeling naked. I wanted to feel connected.

Fran McNabb and her husband live along the Gulf Coast where they raised their two sons. She has used the beaches, islands, and waterways in this area for many of her seven published books. When she and her husband are not boating or fishing, she loves presenting writing workshops. Visit her at www.FranMcNabb.com and mcnabbf@bellsouth.net.