RE: movie ad

["Elliott C. Evans" <eeyore+ -at- cmu -dot- edu>]

A true story from the life of a technology geek:

I was out at lunch with some coworkers a few months ago when my cell phone
rang. It was my garage. I had dropped off my car that morning for inspection,
and they decided that I needed a new muffler. I was pretty sure that they had
installed the last muffler and that the lifetime warranty was still in play.
So, I pulled out my Palm, and opened my car service database. Sure enough,
they had installed the muffler and I could give them the exact date. The
mechanic said he'd put the new muffler in for no charge, and we ended the
call. About halfway through this process I realized

AT THIS MOMENT I AM PROBABLY THE MOST ANNOYING MAN IN THE WORLD

but the fact of the matter is that I was able to handle the entire situation
in three minutes during one phone call. Without my phone and Palm, I would
have had to wait until I got back to the office, get my phone message, call
them back, ask them to pull the service book out of the glovebox or look it
up in their records, possibly miss them and have to leave a message, etcetera.
During this process, work on my car would have halted. Of course, this
progress came with a price (my coworkers made fun of me for ten whole minutes)
but I decided this was one incident where my geekery paid off.

I keep track of incidents like this, and assign rough values to them. If you
start doing this in your life, you can gauge whether or not a PDA is worth
the money to you. For instance how much are the minutes worth to you that you
spend writing repeating appointments over and over in your Dayrunner? If you
lost your Dayrunner, how much would a complete backup of that data be worth
to you? How much would it be worth to you to be able to see your appointment
data in daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly formats without having to collate
the information yourself?

I've started keeping track of the number of times I wish I could use the
Internet from my Palm. At roughly 25 cents a pop, I will have to wish this
180 times a month to justify the $45 per month service fee, but if the
number of times keeps increasing while the cost keeps decreasing, eventually
they will converge and I'll buy a wireless Internet device.

My point is, sure, not everyone needs a cell phone or PDA, but some of us
do actually get enough use out of them to justify the cost, and we actually
*use* them. If I was interested in a mere status object, I would have
upgraded my PalmIII to something more expensive by now, and I would have
gotten the $80 cellphone instead of the $20 cellphone.
--
Elliott C. "Eeyore" Evans                    eeyore+ -at- cmu -dot- edu