Stuff That Blows My Mind

Positive Thinking & Blogging...


I've found myself sitting here this morning wide awake, when I should probably be asleep, checking the FedEX website following the "tracking numbers" on a couple of boxes worth a couple of thousand dollars to me in the next month if they get to their destination safely and perform as intended/specified.

Being somewhat of a hopeless romantic, I can't help but think about how far the business world has come since my first days in my first job--as an idiot intern after high school graduation at the United States Army Aeromedical Research Lab (USAARL) at Ft. Rucker, Alabama.

Back then these guys, being on the forefront of technology...while still using carbon paper in some of the typewriters...had these fancy clunky dedicated IBM "word processors."

I thought that it was pretty cool and couldn't keep my hands of them when the Secretaries were at lunch. (the Word Processors...not the Secretaries...OK maybe one of them...)

In 1978 a "word processor" was basically a typewriter with memory...a machine with something the size of a bar/dorm room refrigerator attached to it that could spit out letters and forms while you filled in the blanks with the answers to "Dear..." and "Sincerely..." being the only variables in the equation.

Fast forward to yesterday morning and I wrote three purchase orders, one invoice, and a couple of packing slips and printed them out in color, in triplicate, without a shred of carbon paper in sight.

Then as to communicating with my customer and keeping them up to date?

In 1983, in my first real Engineering job, with a company located off Peachtree Street, we still had the carbon paper in Miss Eller's Typewriter and we were just converting from rotary to touch tone telephones in Atlanta, but only Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers on the TV show "Hart to Hart had cell phones--and those were the size of a cinder block and were mounted in the trunk of their Mercedes Benz 450 SL Convertibles.

At that time people still used telex and telegraph machines in their offices, and we would have two or three weeks to do a proposal because you had to allow for the US Post office or UPS to deliver the package across the country.

Today everybody wants to ask for a proposal in the morning and expects to have a price by 5 PM regardless of the circumstances or quality of the efforts involved.

I think we all end up paying more for the speed of the answer rather than the end result of the overall efforts involved in producing the product...better to err high than low on the price and lose money.

The first time I used a FAX machine was sometime about 1986 and it was a borrowed transmission at my old GT roommates' company to get a proposal out the door before the deadline.

Today almost everyone has fax machines or fax capability on their computers but let's face it...

other than the idiots in GOVERNMENT OFFICES, fax transmissions have pretty much been rendered obsolete by E-mail attachments of MS Word documents or PDF copies of same.

And that brings me back to my current freight shipments this past week, and the technology that allows me to follow my packages across the country from Knoxville to Kansas City.

I know my stuff was in Nashville yesterday, and I know it continues westward this morning.

And I know all of that by simply pecking on a computer keyboard and entering a few numbers.

I can do the same thing from my Web enabled Verizon LG Dare Touch Screen Cell Phone.

Sometimes I guess it makes sense to stop complaining, especially during the holiday season, and acknowledge how good things have been in 2009.

Not perfect, but it could have been a lot worse...