Does technology help?

Read an interesting article in The Sunday Telegraph's Stella magazine. Apparently it seems, it is the in-thing for women to comment to each other that they are not having sex with their husband. Strange. One can never understand women. I'm convinced!!!

Neways, this blog is not about analyzing the behaviour of the female of our species. That would need an entire WWW (web 3.0 perhaps). This one is about two sentences in the article. & I quote verbatim 'The modern professional workday is far more demanding than its predecessors. It last much longer, and the various technologies that were supposed to liberate workers from the office have in fact made the whole world an office.' Unquote.

Isn't the above statement (especially the bold red part) absolutely true for most of us? Day in and day out, a new technology is unveiled, which is supposed to make our life easier and our waking hours more efficient. But the end result is exactly the opposite.

The cell-phone is the biggest culprit (especially the company provided one). Though you may not be on 24x7 support, many a times you do get a call/message at unusual hours. Sometimes the timing is so cruel as to kill the whole occasion itself. If the cell-phone is bad then the Blackberry is devil personified. You get whole emails on the move and ppl expect you to respond. No respite on long distance trains also...:(

Next comes email. The ultimate killer app for the Internet now seems to be killing us. Not a week passes without us hearing about a new virus /dangerous spam mail doing the rounds. Billions are spent on buying and maintaining anti-virus, anti-spy, script disabling, cookie disabling softwares. About productivity, the less said the better. For a single issue to be resolved, you get caught up in an endless merry-go-round of mails. The ultimate kill is when you need to finally send an email about arranging a meeting to solve the issue. I thought, at least we were saving paper by communicating electronically. But think about this. Hasn’t the frequency of communication increased exponentially these days, what with flat management structures and other paradigms being applied. So what would have been achieved by a single memo OR meeting in the good old days of our parents is now achieved with the help of 10 emails AND a meeting. And to top it, we have productivity improvement as one of our KRAs!!!!

The above are just two examples. I could rant on and on. But would like to hear from you on this. Your take plsss..

Bathroom Thought for the day: My clothes don't fit me any more. Need to go easy on chips.