Saturday, March 22, 2014

When #tech makes it easy peasy lemon squeezy

If you're immersed in technology as many of us are, with smartphones, smart TVs, smart meters, tablets, laptops, desktops, fitness bracelets and ubiquitous connectivity, you probably have days when none of it seems to work as it should. The effort required to get it to work as you need it to seems like a very poor investment. You just want to through it all in the street and drive over it repeatedly with your pickup truck.

On the other hand, there are days when all of this works harmoniously in a symphony of orchestrated people, processes and technologies to accomplish tasks large and small. The other evening I was finishing a client presentation and printed a few paper copies to bring to the meeting the next day. From my laptop somewhere downstairs, I sent the job to my printer somewhere upstairs. While the printer was doing what printers do, it sent an alert to my laptop that the yellow ink was low - not empty, just low. It even sent me a link to the manufacturer's web site where I could order more yellow ink. I followed the link and checked the price. Then, with a quick copy and paste of the part number, I checked the price for the same item on Amazon.com where it was offered for about 10% less. Thanks to my Amazon Prime membership, two-day shipping was free. I hit the "Buy Now with 1-click" button and that was that, in less than a minute.

Two days later, my yellow ink cartridge arrived at the front door. That's how all of this stuff is supposed to work. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. 

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