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DAVID GARFINKEL |
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(with access to millions!)
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How the computer enables
the Lone (Social) Butterfly
By DAVID GARFFINKEL
for TheColumnists.com
I was Instant Messaging a friend across the country the other night when the talk turned to a new software program called “Scrivener.” My friend sent me the link and I went nuts.
I simply had to have it. This is the software made for writers. It lets you storyboard, corkboard, and write, without all those annoying Microsoft Word rules, icons, squiggly lines and numbers at the top and bottom of your screen.
Only one catch: I’ll have to lay down my longstanding resistance to getting a Mac. But this is a small matter, because now, for the first time ever, I know that getting a Mac will let me enjoy my favorite activity even more--being alone.
Now I'll be the first to admit-it's weird. I'll go one step further--it's downright paradoxical. I really enjoy spending time alone. A lot of it. Most of it.
But--besides the considerable differences in financial net worth--I'm no Howard Hughes. I actually like people and I have hundreds of friends.
So… what's a sociable hermit to do?
Fortunately, I was born in the right place at the right time. Computers made this life possible.
As soon as personal computers became available to non-geeks (or non-adept geeks), I bought one--a Kaypro II, in 1981.
And as soon as email was available (there was an early form of it on the market, called MCI Mail, in the mid-1980s), I signed up for it. It was incredibly complicated to use, and there was almost no one to email to. No one I knew of, anyway.
No matter to me. The promise of being able to send electronic letters to other people from a computer keyboard in my home was enough to get me to shell out the money and ride the learning curve.
And finally, when I got my first fax for my home office in the early 1990s, I was in hog heaven.
Now, just how far did I take this love of being a (less than stunning-looking) modern, male Greta Garbo? (I once had a business partner who called me "Garbo-finkel.")
Here’s an example. One of my best friends and business associates--oddly enough a banker who helped me in unusual legal ways that I would just as soon not go into too many details about here--lived in Vermont in the early 90s. I lived in San Francisco.
We got to know each other very well. I spent hours listening to him tell of his efforts to save a marriage that was slipping away from him. He helped me publish and distribute one of my first business educational products. I got to know him like a brother.
We didn’t see each other face-to-face for more than 10 years. All communications with him were long-distance-by phone, by mail, by fax, by email.
Today, it’s routine to have an email address and do business or have friendships with people they've never met in person. But I seem to specialize in that way of knowing other people, on purpose, and happily so.
I have coaching and consulting clients, in the U.S. and on other continents, whom I met by email and with whom I conduct business by phone. It probably helps that I have a couple of technologies which allow me to record calls. Then I can instantly post, on a Web page, downloadable .mp3 recordings of our conversations.
I still get excited over new technologies that help me in my long-distance social life or work, as in the case of Scrivener.
All of this has never seemed that strange to me until I really started to think about it. But it certainly has confounded other people.
After all, as Woody Allen says, "Eighty percent of success is showing up."
The only thing I can think of is: Maybe
I'm part of that other 20 percent.
©2008 by David Garfinkel.
The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco
Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. We recognize the help
of staff columnist Michael Johnson in arranging and editing this
column. This column first posted on May 5, 2008.
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