Email Elizabethinternet
Is the Internet Stripping Away Human Contact?
Technology doesn’t always win when it separates us from human contact.
Because of the internet, some people believe they don’t need professionals anymore. Like, why go to the doctor when you can Google your symptoms to figure out why your $hit is F’d Up, including seemingly viable treatment options? It’s all right there in front of your eyes with pictures and everything. Because you are not a medical professional with a decade of education, and you could be wrong. You’re a fry cook at Arby’s, for crying out loud. Not only could you be wrong, but you could overlook something else potentially more life threatening.
People also think why call a travel agent when you can book airfare and hotels right there online. Because you probably won’t find the best deal, and Google doesn’t know everything. There is no substitute for a travel agent’s personal relationship with a vendor, and you don’t get that from a third-party website. Without a travel agent, without that human contact, who can you call when the (choose one or all): airline, car rental, hotel screw up?
It would not surprise me to learn that Siri hates everybody.
I imagine the day when we no longer talk to people to transact business. I already see it at airports when I travel, kiosks to tag baggage and retrieve boarding passes. Kiosks to buy that last-minute big-ticket item you’ve been putting off like whoa, look, a 75-inch television and suddenly you need to buy it, RIGHT NOW, before you get on the plane. “Reward” or “Loyalty” cards process and distribute your personal data without your awareness and market like crazy to you. In fact, it’s a little scary to see the Minority Report turned into a TV show coming this fall to FOX.
Some people also honestly believe they don’t need a Sacramento Realtor because they once ran a lemonade stand as a kid or sold flower seeds door-to-door and therefore know everything there is to know about real estate because there is really nothing to know as all the photos of homes are online, duh. These people are idiots. You can’t tell them they’re an idiot because they’re too busy trying to cut into their gut to perform liposuction on themselves, and by golly, they’ve got the vacuum cleaner handy.
The internet is a great place to do research and compile questions to ask a professional. Just pay attention to the authority of the URL. Make sure you are obtaining your information from a trusted source. The need to connect with professionals via human contact is more important now than ever. Because garbage in is garbage out.
How to be Creative When Your Technology Fails to Work
There is really only one given that is absolutely true about modern technology and that is when it stops working — and it will stop working at some point or it is not modern technology — how do you get through the misery? And don’t start in about the starving kids in China or the refugee immigrants without cellphones; I know all about the raving lunatics 30,000 feet in the air who explode because they can’t get an internet connection 100% of the time. Stuff is meant not to work now and then. If it worked all of the time, you would call that magic.
It’s not what happens to you or how frustrating it seems when technology breaks, it’s how you deal with it. I know how a Sacramento REALTOR, for example, might feel about her brand new, fancy-schmancy iBox with bluetooth going on the blink. The thought could cross her mind that she is saddled with a piece of crap, not to mention a leased piece of crap, but she probably should not verbalize those words to the people who worked so incredibly hard to bring this piece of new technology to MetroList subscribers. Sometimes, Bluetooth technology does not work.
One has a choice in these situations. Unfortunately, one of those choices is now attached to a railing of a home in Land Park where it could possibly remain until hell freezes over, but on the other side of the coin, there is a point where one should find an alternative. One can stand there entering a code into her display key over and over, and get the same result (defined as insanity), which is the iBox is not reading the display key. It doesn’t read Bluetooth from a cellphone, either. One could leave all of those boxes in her car and just use her old lockboxes, her reliable infrared lockboxes and, in fact, such a lockbox is now nestled next to the big honkin’ fancy-schmancy iBox.
We also have to make decisions when, say, our Internet service goes wonky. Surewest is now something else, some alphabet letters, and it wasn’t working correctly this morning. I needed to turn my iPad into a hotspot and connect it to my laptop to write this blog. But it’s an alternative I have and when I need it, I absolutely need it. Plan B, can’t beat it.
I could be moaning and groaning and yelling at my ISP, but that is a self defeatist attitude. It irritates those who talk to me, and it can completely ruin my day, so I don’t do it. I just get on with my work. Well, I did call my ISP and put in a ticket request, and I did ask my Board to pick up the lifeless iBox but if none of that happens, life continues.
You agents, give some thought to how you might use those new fancy-schmancy iBoxes. You might not want to put one on a listing that is miles away from your immediate vicinity.
