Change of phone , change of religion part one
Lets go on a bit of a reminisce….from the start of my road warrior career, 1992, the mobile phone was part of every road warriors life, so making sales calls in the pub or, if you lived down south, on the golf course, was a freedom I took for granted. It would be a while, however, before I started to use e mail, so for a few blissful years if you weren’t contactable on the phone then there was no way of chasing you down. If i wanted to escape i used to book sales calls in North Yorkshire where there was no phone signal……it was bliss…Friday afternoons simply became part of the weekend..
Lets fast forward a few years and e mail is now with us and part of everyday life. While it has its advantages there was now that horrible feeling that if you weren’t on the phone you had to be available on e mail , and the only way to do that was to be IN THE OFFICE !!!!! the caged prison of every road warrior. Even home Internet was not yet common……
Around 2002/3 ( if my failing memory serves me well) I was handed a palm sized, rectangular device with a thumb wheel, a black and white screen and a slightly strange logo with little rectangles arranged in an odd pattern….little did I know that this device and everything, that came after it would forever change the way I worked. I would suggest to you that the Blackberry was the catalyst that changed the way we all worked, and for me it was the best piece of technology that I have ever adopted. The single most important aspect of this being that you can be anywhere in the world and still do business (and yes, that means Friday afternoons!!!)