Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Unfortunate events provide yet another great reason to use a clipboard and a pencil.

My records indicate that this is the fourth blog post I have written about the clipboard and the pencil. The gist is that these old, simple tools are still quite valuable. Hence, we might reconsider a few other old tools from time to time.

Folks in Louisiana recently experienced Hurricane Ida. Power lines were knocked to the ground by the wind and objects hurled by the wind. Folks were without power for … well on the day I write this, it has been three weeks and some folks are still without power.

Computers don’t work well without electric power.

The clipboard and the pencil work just fine without electric power.

Now, the obvious is written and out of the way, let’s move on to more detailed situations. A close acquaintance has a whole-house generator. It runs 24 hours a day and the TV and computer are on (air conditioning, refrigerator, and other more important things, too). Aha! There! Forget the clipboard and pencil. Right? Wrong.

Internet service, TV, and phone (one of those great bundle package things) were out. Generator electricity didn’t help. Those systems—carried by telephone line—were down on the ground. All those cloud computing resources to store information and such were down. No email, no files, no photos, no videos, no this and no that, either.

The cellphone service came back after a week. That was a blessing. Take notes of this call and that call and this repairman and that generator-fuel man? The clipboard and the pencil worked. Nothing else did. The home computer worked with its local data storage, but if the generator ran out of fuel (which it did), the local data storage went down. Use you smartphone as your home computer! That works for somethings, but most of its capabilities are cloud based and…well much of those went down. And smartphones need recharging, which needs electric power, which is out when the generator is out of fuel and so on.

And, by the way, notes written for later blog posts and other history were recorded with the clipboard and the pencil. Simple. Durable. Reliable.

Extreme example? Yes. Lessons to learn? Also, yes. Applications elsewhere? Again, yes. I hope you learn from this extreme and painful example without having to suffer through it yourself or something akin to it.