Loose Ends

Loose Ends

First, and perhaps most important, I got my replacement PDA from Dell yesterday…FINALLY! I knew that my PDA had become a very important part of how I kept organized and how I ran my life, but I really had not realized how much I relied on it, until this week. I keep notes from meetings, all my personal and business contacts, my entire calendar, and all my financials (via Pocket Quicken) in my PDA. Of course, I also have my copy of Monopoly for the Pocket PC and Pocket Conquest (Risk) to occupy my mind while eating lunch! I found myself lugging a laptop around to meetings so I could make comments directly into Outlook. While this was not a horrible thing, I would have never thought to carry a laptop from meeting to meeting just five or seven years ago…before my first Palm.

I found that I had so completely disassembled my old analog ways that it was hard to go back. I could not find a decent pad of paper for making meeting notes anywhere in my office. I noticed that I had to keep receipts folded up in my pocket so I could record them in Quicken when I got home. Before Pocket Quicken, I used to carry my checkbook and make those entries as I made the expenditures. Technically, I do not even own a traditional “checkbook” anymore.

This was a big week at work. Several of us were working to bring ADP’s Enterprise eTIME on line for a trial. Things went pretty well. However, we missed our “go live” date. The software was delivered so late that we had to do a limited parallel process, rather than a building-wide paper and digital parallel, as had been originally planned. Of course, not having my PDA to remind me of meeting times, made the process even more trying.

I am not sure what I really learned from my broken PDA experience. I have learned that yelling at Dell does not speed up the process. I also learned that an old computing adage works with PDAs, too. Back up your system and back it up often. I started doing a system backup on my PDA every two weeks. When I got my new device, the back up was about two weeks old, but the migration to the new hardware was pretty good. Certainly better than reconstructing everything from scratch (my typical M.O.).