Today I worked from
home. I don’t do that very often, and in fact it’s the first time I have since
I started at Adobe. And it was easy. Heck, my boss (who lives in Atlanta)
probably didn’t even realize I wasn’t in the office today – since I still got
all my work done, and responded to his emails as fast today as any other day.
The truth of the matter is that I could probably do my job
from anywhere. I mean, as long as I have a cellphone and wifi, I can do about
95% of my job. Most of my meetings are Conference Calls. And instead of
“actual” Meeting Rooms, I have an Adobe Connect Meeting Room (a Virtual Meeting
Room) – so I send out a link and my coworkers can see whatever I choose to
share on my computer screen. Which is especially great since most of the people
that I work with work either out of a different Adobe Office, or (more likely)
from home.
I can remember my first Corporate job. I was 16-years-old,
and I was the Office Manager for Equitec Financial Group Inc. (that was later
bought-out by Warren Buffet). It was 1981 and I worked in the Property
Management division, in the office. And yes, I really was the Office Manager,
even at that young age – because back then all real estate contracts had to be
typed up, and I could type like the wind (95+wpm). It would sometimes take
HOURS to type up a contract, and then if one little thing needed to be changed
(unless I could work some magic with White-Out), I would often have to type it
up again.
pic: I actually had this “laptop” — it weighed 25 lbs!
In the 35 years I have been working, I have seen amazing
changes in technology. From the fascination when IBM Selectric typewriters came
out, the ones with the balls – and we could change the ball and type in
Italics. WOW – that was lifechanging. When I worked for the LDS Church doing
Genealogy, and we had Green Screen Terminals for our computers – and our world
was revolutionized by having DOS-based screens that we could change to 16
different colors. Oooooooooo – pretty colors! And then in 1992, just as I
started at Franklin Covey, Windows was brand new – and everyone was
transitioning away from DOS, and I ended-up ahead of the curve just because I
had fortuitous timing and learned the Windows stuff first and fast. And within
a few years, Al Gore had invented the internet, and suddenly instead of mailing
disks across country, I could go to an FTP site and upload and download files
to coworkers thousands of miles away. Astounding!
Today, I can do most of my work from my Smartphone. With
calling, emails, and apps, much of my job can be done from a device smaller
than the Compact Mirror I carried in my purse to that first job not so many
years ago. And now with Satellite Phones and Mifi (portable personal hotspots
for internet), I could literally be in the middle of the desert in a tent and
still do my job. Maybe it’s not “walking uphill both ways in the snow”, but I
certainly have seen quite a few changes in the Corporate America set-up over
the years. And with the advantage of working at Adobe, I am literally on the
forefront of some of the most amazing advancements that we will see this
decade.
Yes, I know that it makes me sound old to reminisce about
typewriters and my old Commodore 64 computer, but heck – that’s part of what
getting older is all about. And with 50 rapidly approaching, I guess I just
have to admit that, yes, I am older than the internet.
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