Technology and the emerging Virtual Assistant: Help or hindrance?

As a new VA and a self-confessed “gadget-geek”, I love my Treo 650 as I loved my Treo 600 before it. It came along at a time in my life when having both a phone and a separate Palm was becoming a real nuisance, I was becoming weighted down with devices and it seemed to be a ridiculous state to be in. At the time, the Treo wasn’t even being offered in Canada and I had to purchase it online after numerous calls to ensure my current provider would actually connect it once it arrived.

The obvious disadvantages of the Treo I find are the limited use for the Palm software that came with the Treo. I have to this point refrained from purchasing a new calendar program as the obvious advantages to such a purchase would be the better integration with email. As I have opted out of the data plan that enabled me to connect to the Web and email from my provider as it was cost-prohibitive, it seems to be counter-productive to not take advantage of this. While I understand the cost of such plans have diminished over the past year or two, I am still reluctant to buy into them for fear of the ‘over-use’ billing I have encountered in the past. It has been exorbitant, to the tune of a charge of $20 for accessing a single e-mail.

Additionally, despite my love for electronic devices, at times I long for a straight calendar that I can simply open up and see my entire month at a glance. While the Treo does offer this, it is of such a size that I cannot identify individual date appointments without going further to pinpoint what is scheduled on any given day. A simple way around this would be to do a weekly print of my monthly schedule and I may end up resorting to such a task.

Lastly, the requirement to continually synch my Treo to my desktop to ensure an up-to-date database is sometimes a chore I simply prefer to avoid. The option to synch my Treo to my Outlook has proven to not be an option as when I followed the instructions to do such a conversion, I was unable to synch at all. Thereafter, followed a long 4-month stint in which my Treo remained a lone connection of little or no use and my desktop was updated and used more fully. I finally fixed the connection error by reverting to synching with the original Palm software, but one again wonders where the benefit to all this technology has led me? I fully admit that I have been an unwilling participant to aiding my own cause. Having a friend who picks up the phone to call his provider at the first sign of trouble or even an innocent query shows our relative schedule and personality disparities. He has the time to spend hours chatting to helpful call centre staff while I would rather bang my head against a wall than sit waiting on a phone (that’s costing me .50 a minute) on hold for hours on end to find myself being transferred twelve times before someone admits they don’t know the answer to the question.

Funnily enough, my usual solution to this particular state of affairs is to go out and buy something that is newer and better. I inevitably encounter a whole new set of technical difficulties and it is always interesting to see how I fare with each new device. My husband recently acquired the 700w Treo that is Windows-based, much to my excitement. It was a replacement for a Treo 650 that kept dropping calls. Continually, without fail, at every single phone call. It was the only thing you could rely on. You would phone him, knowing that the connection would suddenly disappear. His new Treo 700w replacement kept shutting down and locking him out, always in the middle of a call and after a 2-week stint of this behavior and no sign of improvement, he exchanged it for yet another 700w. We have had the new phone for less than 24-hours and have yet to get the ringer to work. It will be interesting to see if this results in yet another new phone or whether some obscure setting has been triggered. A quick search on the Palm boards shows this problem has no easy solution and I was amused to see that, in the 20 minutes I played with it this morning, I have already tried all the suggested fixes. Maybe I am not such a hapless geek after all, but it leaves me with the uneasy feeling that if all this technology is not helping us, why do we keep on using it?

 

All content © 2007 Kate V. Kerans. All rights reserved.