Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Networked world (and keeping address books up to date)
I've been working through my admin (and main tasks for the day)and the differences between the networked and physical world struck me.
I guess my conclusions about this to far are:
Hmmm. I'm not going to spend too much time worrying about this.
- The day before yesterday I send an eMail to an long-term acquaintance of mine. I used the address in my (computer) address-book. The note was about setting up a meeting between us in early December. The note bounced. Fortunately the "bounce" message gave some advice about changing the domain. I followed this and...
- Today I got a message back from him. This made me wonder about how close I got to losing one particular valued contact. In fact I didn't get that close, as I have his, and his mother's snail-mail addresses and telephone numbers (but I had to check).
- Anyway, said acquaintance lives in England, and has a girlfriend who lives in the USA. This made me wonder about the difference between the networked and real world.
- Another of my action items was to allow my Manager's secretary to set up a (physical) meeting between the Manager and me for around the end of the month. The problem is that, I don't know where I'm going to be (plus or minus 250 miles). The solution is: we've set up the meeting anyway but I will have to manage the consequences and may have to reschedule (or do it by phone, which in this case would be a poor second choice). This set me thinking about the difficulties of managing "physical world interactions" in an organisation which, most of the time, works through the network.
- And then there are the 'phone messages, which a representative of a "Financial Services Organisation" keeps leaving for me. The problem is, we did some business a few weeks ago, and he couldn't print some papers out at the time. He sent me a package in the post (with some stuff for me to sign) and, to cut the story short, he made some mistakes which we've been correcting since (and I'm only in the correct location to pick up the snail-mail once a week). So here we have a problem with dealing using paper when I think both of us are used to using the net.
I guess my conclusions about this to far are:
- "The net" may be ubiquitous, but it isn't everything.
- Physical location is important (especially to physical beings, like me!)
- You can have problems when "network" creates expectations, but things have to work using the physical world (and I suppose vice-versa).
Hmmm. I'm not going to spend too much time worrying about this.
# posted by tom_gillies @ 1:05 PM 
