When I arrived at the office this morning, the power was out. A plane crashed just after taking off from the Palo Alto airport, killing all three people on board (all were employees of the Tesla electric car company), clipping a power line, and apparently taking out a couple of transformers. It took all day for PG&E and the Palo Alto municipal light plant to get the power back up, but just as it was getting dark this evening the power came back on.
When I first started working in churches in 1994, I had a computer on my desk, but I spent less than a third of my time working at the computer. Now I think I spend about two thirds of my time working at the computer, and I’ve gotten so accustomed to working at the computer I had to stop and think how to work without a computer. I had a curriculum planning meeting in the morning — no going online to look up curriculum resources; no bringing up the database to check enrollment trends — we had to look at actual pieces of paper and books instead of at lighted screens. Once that meeting was over, I had to figure out how to spend my day. No email, the phone system goes down without power, no electronic documents — so I did some filing, cleaned out a storage closet, wrote up next year’s curriculum grid by hand, had another meeting, talked to a couple of people who stopped by the office, took a walk, did some planning.
With no phone, Web, or email all day long, I felt cut off. On the other hand, it was nice not staring into a lighted screen all day, and I realized that I wished my job did not require me to spend quite so much time using a computer.
Two Comments.
1. A modern laptop computer can run for up to 8 hours on internal battery power. So you could have continued working.
2. I have lost two good friends, experienced pilots, who crashed while piloting their own planes. One crashed while trying to land in a fog. The other crashed due to engine failure over the Rockies while flying home in a new plane he had just purchased.
I prefer to fly in large commercial airliners. Tbey do have better safety record statistics.
Dad @ 1 — Alas, the computer supplied by the church is a desktop. And while I had my personal laptop with me, there’s no physical Ethernet connection, only a wifi transmitter that needs power in order to work — so no Internet connection, which meant no email, no working on the shared documents on the intranet or on the Internet, etc.
I hear you – I’ve been on vacation this week, and made a vow to myself to NOT use my computer AT ALL this week to give myself a break from staring at that blasted screen. (But my work email has limited storage capacity, so I did have to go online today to delete 55 emails to make room for anything important coming my way. Sigh.)