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Frank is stuck in a meeting. It's now 5.30pm and he was supposed to finish work at 5. There doesn't seem to be any end in sight. Whose idea was it to schedule a major policy meeting at 4pm? Normally Frank wouldn't mind staying, but today his wife was due to pick him up at 5.05pm. Frank knows she will be wondering where he is but he doesn't have a mobile phone and can't leave the meeting because he is too professional and also because he is keeping the minutes. He calculates that his wife, Sandra, will probably wait for him until 5.30 and then return home.
Sandra pulls up outside her husband's office at 5.10pm. She's a little late because she was rushing to finish some work for a client. She hasn't finished it yet but she knows Frank will be waiting for her so she finishes what she can and then goes to pick him up. Frank isn't there. Is he late out too or has he been and gone already? No, he'd wait. Sandra decides to hang around. By 5.30 Frank still hasn't shown up. She rings his office on her mobile and there is no answer. He is probably still in a meeting. At 5.35pm Sandra drives back home to finish the work she was doing and waits to hear from Frank.
Frank finally gets out of the meeting at 6.15pm and goes to meet Sandra. She isn't there. He figures she has probably gone back home. He doesn't have a mobile, so he goes back to his office to phone her. Meanwhile, Sandra has finished her work and decided to back to find Frank, who she figures will start making his own way home if he she isn't waiting for him. In her rush she has forgotten her mobile. Frank rings home from his office but there is no-one there. He tries calling the mobile but it goes to voicemail so he leaves a message saying he will go back to check if she is waiting for him and if not he will make his own way home. Sandra arrives at the front of Frank's office and he is still not there so she decides to walk to his office to find him. They run into each other half way. It is now 6.50pm.
What went wrong here?
If Frank had a mobile phone he could've fired off a quick text message to Sandra telling her he was stuck in a meeting and that he would call when he was ready to be picked up. Sandra would've saved herself a trip and they would have met up with each other a few minutes after 6.15pm when the meeting finished, saving around half an hour.
But, short of technological timesavers, did anything actually go wrong here? Both Frank and Sandra second-guessed each other's behaviours correctly and resolved the situation together as a result of their own shared understanding. In technological terms, we might say they were in sync.
What if Frank and Sandra were not in sync? Even if Frank did have a mobile, suppose the battery was flat, there was no coverage in the meeting or he had left it in his office? What would happen then? Without an intuitive knowledge of each other's likely movements, it could've taken Frank and Sandra a lot longer to resolve the situation and they certainly would both have been far more frustrated and angry about it.
The role of technology
Technology is great and can save us lots of time and effort, but what if it fails? Hardly anyone remembers phone numbers any more because the mobile phone or the laptop does, but what if we had to remember one in an emergency? Our partner's medical records might well be easy to reach on a computer file, but what if that file is unavailable and a doctor needs to know urgently about medications, conditions and blood type?
If we have outsourced our thought and emotional reasoning to technology, we will find ourselves ill-equipped to cope if the technology we placed our trust in fails. Digital technology is rapidly changing the world around us in almost every way, and the changes are inevitable and unstoppable. Should we embrace each new idea as it comes along or rely on our own resolve and hold out against the technological onslaught?
The answer is to adapt. To look at new technology without fear, decide if it can help us and if so, change our behaviour to take advantage of this new benefit. Much of technology's benefits are about making things quicker, simpler or both. Technology is about helping us better achieve what we already do, and about making new things possible to do. Therefore we should make room for technology in our lives, but we should not make our lives simply a room for technology.
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