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| Last updated at 1:28 AM on 22/04/07 |
So that’s what keys are for 
The Telegram
There was a story making the rounds on the Internet a while ago about a young driver who phoned her dad in a panic after locking herself out of her car.
“What happened?” he asked. “Did you lose the keys?”
“I’ve got the keys in my hand,” she cried, “but the remote’s not working — the batteries are dead and the door won’t unlock. What am I going to do?”
“Take the key,” her dad told her, “put it in the slot in the door, and unlock it.”
And for the first time in her young life, she used a car key to open a car door.
Who knew keys were so useful?
Whether the story was true or apocryphal doesn’t much matter since the humour in it works whether we decide it’s just an urban legend, or something that really happened.
Either way, most of us can imagine something similar happening to us (though those of us with more grey hairs would be quicker to remember that a car key does more than start the engine).
A bit more than a laugh lurks deeper in the story, though, and it has to do with how quickly we get used to technology, and how fast it can divorce us from old skills and common sense.
That point was driven home Wednesday with news that Research in Motion’s BlackBerry mail system broke down overnight, leaving millions unable to receive e-mails for several hours.
You’d think the sky had fallen.
Newscasts told tales of Bay Street bankers unable to communicate at 2 a.m., of hacks and flacks on Parliament Hill cut off from MPs and bureaucrats, of BlackBerry addicts going through white-collar withdrawal as their belt-buddies fell silent.
“It was like a bunch of guys hanging around a narcotics anonymous meeting, completely cut off from their information,” one broker told reporters.
Except they weren’t.
They could have followed the markets on the Internet, used their computer to send e-mail — even picked up a phone to call someone.
Like our young driver, those BlackBerry addicts weren’t truly shut out of something — they just needed a different tool to open the door.
That’s the curse of technology — that it so quickly makes us forget how to open those doors, when the latest key doesn’t work.
This isn’t a Luddite’s plea to abandon high-tech tools. They are too useful, and too ubiquitous, to abandon.
But we should remember that a task isn’t about the tool.
Think of the calculator.
It lets you do arithmetic quickly, but math isn’t about calculators; it’s about numbers and understanding what they represent and how they affect each other.
In the same way, business isn’t about text-messaging and BlackBerrys. It about communication and closing a deal.
And if the world goes to hell when some software bug short-circuits global e-mail, don’t panic. Business can be done over the phone, by fax, even face to face.
Who knew?
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22/04/07
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