and how the iPad saved the day
Part 1

I love new technology (if you hadn’t guessed already) but the traditionalist in my never really disappeared. With my background being in administration with a little librarianship along the way, you can imagine how I loved my paper, my triple copies of everything and my books.

Many years ago (too many than I care to remember) I was issued with a brand new computer thingy to replace my trusty typewriter. I hated it with with a passion but that was probably down to the fact that I was given no instruction on how to use it. [Why is it that just because you can type 80 words a minute without even looking at the keys people assume that you can automatically use a computer?]

Anyway, after I persevered, finally getting to grips with the formatting tags for bold, italics etc (something I never had to bother with on a typewriter) I was a convert. Anything that made my life easier was certainly the top banana for me.

But always at the back of my mind was that little voice of caution. That ‘what if’. We were told that computers would herald the paperless office. [ Hmmm – well certainly not in my experience. In fact it, produced more. It was too easy to rethink and rewrite letters whereas if produced on typewriter they were more careful to get the first draft as perfect as possible.]

My fears were always if we were to keep everything on disk and save valuable office space by reducing the amount of paper to file away, what would happen if we had a power cut? For that reason, I kept everything in hard copy – for years.

As I got to trust technology a little more, I’ve learned to let go of my old administrative ways and little is now printed off and filed in sad looking filing cabinets. I’ve embraced technology to the extent that I would, if I could, have every gadget imaginable (I blame my techie of a husband for nurturing such compulsions). I became quite jealous when Dean got his iPad a few weeks back whereas I have a second hand Galaxy tablet – very nice but nowhere near as responsive. Both devices however, have proved to be very versatile and have allowed us to carry out tasks we would not have otherwise been able to do. More about how the iPad saved the day later.

Although I have the occasional palpitation about how all my eggs seem to be in one basket and what would I do if somehow I couldn’t retrieve them, I quickly dismiss those ugly thoughts.

Until yesterday when we were cut off from the world and the iPad came to the rescue…..

See my next post about how the iPad saved the day.