I can give that question an unequivocal “yes”. This week I dropped my BlackBerry. If you read my last post about My Truly Virtual Office, you can see how vital the BlackBerry is to the whole operation.
From the time I dropped it, there was about 20 hours before I could get to a Verizon store. They will send me a new BlackBerry but it takes 2 days. However, I was smart enough to bring in an old phone to get activated in the meantime. That is why we keep our old phone lying around, right? 24 hours into it’s second tour of duty, my old smartphone blew a gasket. Complete crash – equivalent to a PC blue screen of death, but with no recovery option.
So here I sit, in a coffee shop between appointments, using the wifi and being completely out of touch with clients, friends and family. It will all be resolved this afternoon when the FedEx man brings me my new BlackBerry, but it did make me think about how much we take for granted due to technology.
Here are 3 thoughts for you to ponder:
Do you have a back up of your important phone data, including contacts? Luckily, I had synced my contacts with my Google account so with Internet access, I can access all my contact info and when I have my new BlackBerry, I just need to resync to Google to pull all my calendar and contact info back into my new phone. I also just luckily copied all the photos and videos from my phone last week because I wanted a backup after our trip to the White House.
With that in mind, do you have a backup of ALL your important data? I’ve had enough computer crashes in my career to know the importance of an automatic daily backup of my computers. I also regularly back up my clients’ web sites. I know the host has built in redundancy, but if that does in fact fail, isn’t it better for me to have a backup to reupload immediately or move to a new host.
Do you take the immediacy of our current technology for granted? Do you send an email to someone and assume that they got it and expect an immediate reply? I am usually quick to reply to email because of my BlackBerry but this week, I have only been able to check email a few times a day. And in looking at my Inbox, I have 2115 messages in the last two months. That is not spam and that is only one of my many email addresses. Of those messages, 1249 are unread. What that means is that I most likely saw it come over and read the subject, but I haven’t read it completely or responded to it. I don’t think my Inbox is much different from other professionals out there. My advice: if you send an email on an urgent matter, follow up with a phone call.