Hi. I’m Mike. And I’m white. And I love technology.
That’s as succinct as you’re going to get.
But I’m no tech slut. Sure, I’ve flirted around (I want to love you Linux, but we’re just not right for one another), maybe even had an extended affair (I still miss you, iOS. Thanks for the good times!) and sometimes I get a little freaky (Zune and Windows Phone, you little minxes- we could have had SO much more fun together) but at the end of the day, I want technology to do things for me.
I’ve mostly resisted the siren call of wearables for the lack of a problem to solve. Fitbits provide what I’d call cursory activity monitoring and notifications and little else while more sophisticated smartwatches suffered from poor battery life, lack of useful applications, ecosystem lock or a combination of the three.
I began softening my stance during The COVID Madness and it’s concurrent work from home posture. As the initial two week work from home period morphed into the new (ab)normal semi-permanent arrangement I became increasingly frustrated at my inability to monitor Outlook and make my meetings or respond to important emails in a timely fashion.
Of course this isn’t my issue. It has to be the technology!
My work is mostly creative and I can get lost in thought as I solve vexing problems, create data visualizations or attend meetings tackle interesting projects. But what can a young analyst do? Have a monitor devoted to an email/calendaring app, constantly staring at it for a signal that my overlords are summoning?
If you know me then we already know the answer starts with “fuck” and ends with “that”.
But I do have a work-provided iPhone which already bombards me with dozens of pointless notifications per day.
And there’s the killer app for Apple Watch: put the notifications on my wrist, let me look down, triage the incoming enemy fire (mixed metaphor, get used to it, Fucker) and proceed with The Mission.
It seems like overkill to spend $200 (Did I mention I’m white?) for a single use case but the peace of mind this bad boy delivers is easily worth half an ounce of hydroponic.
Besides, I’ve learned over time that like a K-Bar Knife
this tool has many, many functions.
Much like the man who wears it.