Friday, March 31, 2006

Late starts

I'm not sure if I overslept my alarm today or never set one in the first place - at any rate, I didn't wake up until 8:37 this morning. I'm not even sure what woke me up then - I guess I'm lucky, as I could've easily slept til 10 or 11.

Thankfully it was 'dress-down' day, so I didn't have to spend time putting on the costume that is normally required for office work. I simply threw on what I could find, grabbed a clementine and a packet of crisps for breaky, and jumped on the bus. I'm amazed that I even got here by 9:15.

In a somewhat unrelated note, I observed a sort of generation gap at work today which I thought was worth pointing out. While entering the new membership information into the computer, one of the ladies came across a member who had simply written her house number and street, followed by a town with nothing else. Now, on the computers here, we have an address database program (supplied, I believe by the Royal Mail) so normally it's not a problem to figure stuff like that out. However, in this case it was coming up short, and the ladies were fretting that we had this person's money, but no way to assign it to them. Essentially it would have just sat here until many months in the future, when the woman realized she hadn't received anything in the post yet and presumably would go into the store to complain.

So since we couldn't figure this out with the tools that we had, my first inclination was to punch the address into Google and see what came up. And after that, it was quickly sorted.

Now, by no means am I trying to make myself sound better, I just found it interesting to observe the fact that I immediately thought to check this wealth of information which is available to all of us, and to them, it didn't even occur. I guess 'Google' really is a verb in my vocabulary.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay so I use Google dozens of times every day and by your standards I'm an old geezer.

So is it our North American or maybe even Canadian interest in all things internet that would cause me to be in a different space then your British co-workers of the same generation as me?

Certainly in Canada we have more computers per capita then many countries and more connections to internet. In our home alone there are 3 computers connected to internet and at work out of the 130 staff I have, only 2 are not on a computer regularly and they are the janitorial staff. Even they have access and need to pick up email messages to them.

I started working with a computer 35 years ago and have worked regularly on them each day for the past 20 years. I still don't know half of what you do about computers as you have been on them since you were 3 years old.

Anonymous said...

I recall that when you were 13 you solved a major concern at a computer company because you thought of a different way to approach the issue then the techies in the firm had considered.

Perhaps history repeats itself.

richard said...

google is also a synonym for research