Wednesday, November 26, 2014
All Blogs - What 84 Inches of Snow will Teach You About Technology
www.residentialsystems.com: As Buffaloians, we receive snow warnings all the time, so much so that we have become immune to them. Like the boy who cried wolf, we have stopped taking extra precautions since so many of these storms do not amount to much. So, when we were warned of a Lake Effect storm, not many braced for it. Monday morning at my custom install company’s weekly meeting the subject was never broached. Certainly we did not consider that it would be the last time we saw each other that week.
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4 comments:
This a pretty heartwarming story. You never really appreciate what you have until it is either gone or you are forced to view it in a different light. In this case it was viewing technology in a new light. I can't image what it must be like to be trapped in your own home for days without being able to leave but having the technology to, for example, facetime with loved ones, even if they are only a few blocks away must have been incredibly comforting. It must have also been nice to have another way of keeping the kids entertained. I'm sure that without the ability to rent movies those days would have gone by much more slowly. The ability to continue working from home is, as the author says, a double edges sword. As nice as an escape from work would have been, being able to stay on top of work related things was probably really helpful. As nice as a break is, if it means your workload is doubled or tripled when you get back, the attractiveness of a break kind of goes away. I think the most important uses for technology definitely were when it was used for comfort; talking to loved ones, keeping up to date on the news, and keeping the kids entertained.
As this article points out, the effects of a snowstorm on the people it traps indoors are not the same now as they used to be when we didn’t have access to the technology we use today. You can never feel truly isolated when your family is a phone call away and all your friends able to be reached via social media at a moment’s notice. It is interesting that now that we are all accessible through email pretty much anywhere and at any time, many companies will keep working even through a snowstorm since in many industries, employees can work from home. The article makes a great point about Facebook and the fact that many people now use it as their source of news, reading articles linked by their friends and family. It is nice that the author said they did not only resort to technology for entertainment, and played board games and made puzzles with their kids as well.
This article makes a good point about the convenience if modern technology and its influence on our lives, especially in crisis. Through social media, trapped families could provide entertainment, reach friends and family, and go to work from home. Their story illustrates just how valuable that new technology is to them, and how it was able to connect a community stuck in the snow.
Thank God they had power! I definitely use social media to keep track of weather events, particularly those at home when I'm in Pittsburgh. I'd actually love to know if they were without power at all, and if so, for how long, because that would've been a game changer for sure. The things I think about with winter storms (and I think about them rather frequently) are food, water, heat and communication. I completely agree with the author that when you live in an area with extreme weather alerts regularly, you become desensitized to them, and stop paying attention. My mom and I were once snowed in at home while my dad and brothers were up in Maine. They decided to not come home because the weather wasn't bad yet, and we got 4' of snow in my coastal town, when Maine got maybe 3". We were without power for about 3 days. While I think technology does change the game in extreme weather scenarios like this (which is good, given global warming), it can only change as much game as electricity allows it to. I personally won't throw away my crank radio or stop filling my bathtub ahead of storms anytime soon.
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