they will extinguish the light in your mind so they can get some sleep

Wednesday work blog -

somehow I have managed to convince my employers that blogging is part of my work. Not only that, I have also convinced them to let me blog about work at work as part of my work. Point is, the line between blogging and working has been completely blurred, if not erased. So that's nice and weird.

So much of my work day seems to revolve around either communicating (or waiting for communication from) via a pretty complete spectrum of technology, phones, fax, email, texting, blogs, etc etc etc and I have come to realize that I, and people like me, are totally the reason people don't trust technology to work, even though what I do for a living is try to convince people that the technology we're bringing in will work and they should trust it.

this is why people still send a fax and then call to make sure it came through, why (when they were in use) people would page one another 6 or 8 times 'just to make sure', why people email and then have to check and make sure it was received (and why I will still check to make sure this blog posts correctly) and otherwise feel the need to babysit the things that are supposed to speed up their day. Because every time something gets missed or forgotten and it comes back around to someone in my position that has to field lots and lots of these things you can bet your ass more than once the sender has been given a puzzled shrug and a befuddled "Gee, I never got THAT email". and so it continues and we will never be able to create a trusted system of communication that people can just use with confidence and not feel that nagging need to still spend their time overseeing, because at the end of the day it is still used by humans. and humans will always blame the tool instead of taking the blame themselves.

until we get to the Terminators.
That is what the quest for the first technology free of people slowing it down will get us.
And really, that's the one thing we can count on technology to do for us: Kill us and take over the planet

so really, by not responding to emails in a timely fashion, keeping that thin mistrust alive with some faxes that just magically "didn't come through" and spending time writing a personal blog instead...
I'm really saving humanity...from itself.