Tech Fatigue

How do you use technology?  Are you comfortably planted behind your mahogany desk at the center of your universe, with phone, fax and computer within reach, like a spider at the center of its web, your control center fully activated?

Or do you operate more like a fly, flitting around freely with your iPhone clapped to your ear, tweeting on the run, wired into Google+ and Foursquare, armed with a laptop or tablet and reacting instantly to every signal,  just like our friends in Silicon Valley?

Most of us are a combination of the two types, although those of us lucky enough to work at home probably have more arachnid  tendencies. We who live here wanting to avoid the fast-track insanity down south  have to provide our customers with the same  instant service available in the Bay Area; that is our competition.

When I placed an ad on Craig’s List recently for help learning WordPress and putting this website together, I got 28 responses. Four were from Humboldt County. I know there’s a recession but I was still amazed at the quality of the responders, both domestic  and foreign, many of whom had their own businesses,  long track records and excellent samples. My favorite was a fellow from India named Prath. He suggested we could communicate through desktop sharing and microphone similar to a Cisco web meeting. As a spider-type control freak, I just wasn’t ready to work with anyone I couldn’t yell at in person.  My loss, no doubt.

How do you work? Do you try everything new or do you get “tech fatigue” every time another Google “must-have” comes along?  Are you a spider, a fly or have you achieived a balance and become the best of all hybrids, a butterfly?  Let’s hear from you. And thank you for visiting.