Sunday, May 3, 2009

Times, they are changing.

I'm sitting in my office, at home, converting email from Outlook to Apple.  My relationship with the Vista operating system is coming to an end.  I am the last holdout in my family to convert to Mac.  Now that I can run Windows on Mac, there's no reason to postpone the change, and maybe my kids will quit making fun of me for my choice of computers.

It amazes me how technology has changed my life.  In my twenties I was a tax manager in a "Big 8" accounting firm, with a secretary that typed my letters using carbon paper.  It was a big deal for her to get a word processor and lose the carbon paper.  

As often as not, I was signing tax returns prepared by hand.  At best, they were completed using processing input sheets shipped to an outside company for processing on their computers.  Long distance calls were logged in for billing purposes and staff long distance calls were monitored.  Fax machines were depended on, but you had to make sure the information on the fax was preserved before the information faded from the special paper.

Now I sit in my home office, able to work full time without administrative assistance.  I have clients across the country and across the world, seldom meeting personally, but communicating with email and instant messaging.  Technology lets me complete and transmit documents virtually instantly.  

What a glorious time to live - old enough to appreciate the changes and young enough to learn how to apply them!

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