Here is the holiday 2009...

There are four out of the six of us sitting at the table. Simultaneously, three of us have laptops open and wirelessly connected (you may hear complaints from time to time about AT&T, but from where I sit, load testing the equipment every holiday, UVerse is REALLY good, the kind of good that generates mentions in blogs...), and the fourth is playing her Nintendo DS, plus I have the Blackberry handy to do e-mail monitoring and Facebook updates and the like. Two of us are blogging and one is surfing YouTube. With the advances in telecommunications technology, for all the good we could be doing, we can forget about free radicals - it's the free electrons that are doing the most damage.

I'm all for technology, but there are times when it is a bad thing. The tempo of the work world is such that what is acceptable today is not tomorrow. If we hear back from a company within a day, we can't accept that it will take more than one to answer something complicated. Then later on, if that company takes more than half a day to respond, we become very upset and complain, forgetting that an expectation of 100% improvement in our performance every few months is something we'd never tolerate personally. The purpose of technology was never to replace the worker, just to make them more productive, but it seems as if the most common use of technology is to give us something to gripe about in relationship to how things function.

Take a look at Facebook - it has gone from a social application to one where there is a large number of people filling it with stress and drama and all the things we created 'online' to try to escape. I think we bring the drama online with us because we can't separate the two worlds anymore, since we're seemingly on-call. (As a side note, my friend Steve hit on an idea that has been kind of fun - he refuses to post drama on Facebook, instead staying solidly within the bounds of humor, fun and happiness, all of which are great to see when you go to a place designed to be an island away from it all. Kudos Stevo!)

Technology can be pervasive if we allow it to be. What we all need to remember is that we are first and foremost human, and with that comes a list of limitations that shouldn't be ignored. I'm one to talk, of course, since I'm on vacation today, yet have been keeping tabs on e-mails still. That's the point, though. 5 years ago, it was anathema to expect anything to happen during the last week of the year. No one called about anything, no one got itchy demanding action on anything, etc. They knew it was a week that was traditionally a slower one, and if they were even at work, would not entertain the thought that things would keep the same pace as beforehand. Today that is not the case at all, and slowness in response due to being away from the office carries with it a smaller and smaller sense of acceptability. We are wired into the systems, and as IT workers we must somehow enjoy the invisible umbilical cord that wires us in 24/7, right?

The point is that we have for years done something called overclocking the computer equipment, where you actually get more performance out of a chip than it was designed to give. Now we are overclocking the workers, and the problem with that is that the same thing will happen to them that happens to an overclocked computer chip. In is a simple fact of physics that the more electrical activity there is, the more heat is generated - energy is transferred as heat. The more heat there is, the greater the chance of burning out the component. For example, a modern motherboard will partially melt down in under a second if it is turned on without the attending heat protection (heatsink, cooling, etc.). When that happens to a chip we replace it, but when it happens to a person, how do you adjust?

IT is like a drug in that it gets under your skin, especially if you like to solve puzzles. There is always a missing piece, an improvement, something else to get done. There is no shortage to the work, just a shortage of the time, especially the personal time.

So as I wind this up, I'm going to turn off the laptop, put aside the Crackberry, and play a game with my kids. I'm going to ignore messages requesting assistance with things that happen at the end of NEXT month that are somehow so urgent as to demand attention during the last day of THIS month/year. This post contains more words than I've exchanged with at least one of the kids, and they've been up since 7:30, so it's time to make up for that. Happy New Year, all, and if your IT professional is working today, be a mensch and give them some M&M's as a way of thanking them that they make it possible for you to be online splitting your time between shopping the after-Christmas deals and reading my drivel.