I found technology has enabled me to do many things in my life that I might never have done otherwise.
Sometimes technology gets in the way of doing things, but often people get in the way of technology.
it isn’t unusual for people to lose the advantage that technology can bring becuase they cannot break old habits or refuse to see how technology can help
This proper seems to span all ages.
I work in real estate, and we try to go on a weekly caravan to see the newly listed properties.
An email gets sent out the day before the caravan begging for all the new listings. Eventually we get a Word document with directions to all the places and the order in which we will visit them.
The next morning 15-20 of us meet at one of our offices and prepare to drive around the properties in three or four cars.
Almost always someone will add a property at the last minute or decide that we need to visit a particular house third instead of last.
Instead of taking two minutes to edit the document and reprint it for everyone, someone will announce the changes and hope that enough of the fifteen people and three to four drivers will catch the changes.
While everyone within ear shot tries to scribble down the changes, it is rare that we don’t have problems on the caravan. It is ironic that the building where we meet before we get on the road probably has six or seven computers in it at all time, and at least as many printers.
I have made the suggestion a number of times that we print corrected sheets, but apparently folks would rather operate under false instructions instead of waiting a couple of minutes for a new document.
Every trip someone misses a house or gets them in the wrong order.
It’s almost like the document once it is sent out by email cannot be touched.
Today I decided to skip the chaos. It is hard to watch group think make things more difficult.
Just a little common sense would dictate that we try to have the document we take with us in our autos be as accurate as possible.
One of our printers could spit that out in less than a minute, but we never take the time to do it.
There’s nothing like subscribing to a theory that makes things harder.
Our technological infirmity 
Imagine how much simpler it would be if everyone was tech savvy. If using a Word document, it could be updated and emailed to everyone, then accessed in the car on your iPhone. If changes were necessary en route, the document could still be updated and emailed out, and the revised document received and viewed on the phone.
Or instead of a Word document, how about a ‘map’ document? A series of map bookmarks that could be subscribed to by the local Realtors® and updated on the fly? Using this would give each driver directions from his or her present location (a boon for those joining the caravan late) to the next house on the list — regardless of how many times the order or properties was changed.
My brother is a Realtor in Los Angeles, and I keep thinking of the ways it would be interesting to make technology work for him, but real estate seems to attract mainly people who “think old,” regardless of their actual age. My brother is six years younger than me, but aside from using his Treo, thinks about technology like my 76-year-old dad does.
Not surprisingly I offered to do maps for the caravan, but it was seen as over kill. Actually most of the time we know where we are going, since we live in a area of lots of small towns.
However if someone changes the order of the caravan on the fly it creates havoc. There are people who use technology in real estate, they are just few and far between. I tried to suggest using instant messaging and it brought howls of imagined pain.
There is some great technology around that can help the real estate world, but adoption rates aren’t very good.
Many Realtors® have Blackberry type devices, but generally all I hear is complaints about how poorly they work.
I still remember trying to explain why IMAP is so much better as an email protocol. I tried to tell folks that a good IMAP account monitored by a human being was far more effective that a smart phone which was out of service most of the time due to our living on the edge of cell phone coverage.
When I was at Apple my area associate who monitored my company email would call me or text me that something needed my attention. It was rare that we couldn’t deliver extraordinary service through a combination of common sense and modern technology.
Instant messaging was part of the culture at Apple and at Webmail.us where I worked after Apple. I thought it was a great productivity tool for leveraging a variety of skills across widely dispersed groups.
Thanks for your comment.