My experiments with Tech...

I am a technology illiterate & not immensely proud of it. I would have been over 21 years of age when I first learnt how to switch on a laptop! The first words I typed on the keyboard was – “OK” – after having spent over a minute trying to figure out where the two alphabets were placed on the keyboard.

I never formatted presentations & reports all of my 1st two trimesters at college. I had groupies who would do that while I sat next to them either dictating or just giving them company while they aligned the document & made it presentable (but for you, my horrid grades would have been worse) Summer placements took me to IBM and there I learnt that there exists something known as a Master slide & watermark! If I look at the presentation I made back then, (I get scared) my belief that there are people & companies that look beyond the cosmetic gets strengthened.

I came back to year two with new found power-point skills & started at MS office with a vengeance! Just then I was introduced to windows 07 & the new awakened curiosity bug took me to the world of page settings, smart art etc; It was a good ride.

I joined work at a conglomerate. With over a hundred companies to boast of, I was sure I would be pretty away from all things geeky. Soon I found myself in an atmosphere powered by Seibel, with Ajax, portals, click streams, data churning in the air which reeked strongly of automobiles. It was here I understood the importance of making a single slide with multi messages using ‘custom animation’ in the presentation. I honed my PPT skills to almost a PhD level here given my reporting managers fondness for presentations. (I must mention here, that all reporting managers like presentations, I will like them too!) The presentation I put together here is (one that can make my jaws drop in amazement) one I am myself immensely proud of.

By now I had ‘mastered’ the ‘Art of the fancy’. And with my new-found qualification under my belt, I sped off to a hard core engineering project which required me to have some knowledge of the ground realities & engineering basics (in hindsight, bursts out laughing) Needless to say, my ‘tech skills’ held me in poor stead here as the need was for the ‘correct tech skills’ For a moment I thought I understood why more people opted for IT as a discipline. I survived.

I moved on to an utterly non geeky world of agriculture where tradition required me to write the proper English, use the proper font, write the proper mails & use the right templates. My non-geeky & relaxed self loved it here! But I learnt the nuances of propriety. I put my ppt skills to good use here & explored hitherto unknown arenas & uses of the Web. Webinars, video conferences, tele presence were becoming commonplace. I felt like how the pickle must feel lying in the jar, marinating in the ingredients put around it.

Next came the visit to an era in time 50 years behind ours. I was in a rural set up, drinking well water, sitting on the roadside, when under-the-tree was the ‘coolest’ place to hang out in. The place did not have even a cyber café & kids ran behind a one-off running vehicle on the road randomly giggling & enjoying themselves. Life was simple & easy, yet difficult.

The project period passed & I was over an year in work-life, all set to join an old manufacturing company which would help me get an ‘on-ground’ understanding & help ‘get the hands dirty’. Alas, that was not to be. I joined the Telecommunication sector!

Its been doing me good to ask random questions on and off. I have handled quite a few things tech. And I have concluded that the lesser one knows the better it is for the self & for the companies one works at.

All these years interspersed with SAS, Seibel, Ajax, 3G, HSDPA, HSUPA, CHS, Switches & not to forget MS office have still not convinced me that I understand anything remotely technical, IT or geeky. However, I do spend larger hours on the internet than ever before. One think that Google did for me is helping me think lesser, what fB did for me to help me meet ‘friends’ after over eternity. I don’t know if that is good. I still don’t know whether tech includes engineering, MS office, jazzy system languages or network operations. What I do know, is that I can be excused – I admit, “I am a tech illiterate.”