Saturday, February 11, 2006

Ink isn't about 'geek' it's about communicating

Yesterday I had another one of those "this is why I have a tablet" moment. I was communicating, via Skype and Windows Messenger Live (thanks for the invite Rob!) with our field book keeper in Macedonia, the next country over from mine. We run a holistic ministry center in my city and I was talking with the bookkeeper about how to best communicate the financial details to our mission team and our national co-workers. She and I have been struggling to come up with a graph that best illustrates the data I want to communicate, but I just couldn't get it across to her.

I looked down at my WM Live window and noticed a pen icon....a ha! I quickly sketched the type of income/expense graph I was looking for in the Messenger window. This was the first time I'd used messenger and it took ten second. I hit send and a moment later heard her begin to laugh.

"You sure love your new toy, don't you!" she said.

"Ah, ya. But it's all about communicating. Now you know exactly what I'm looking for, don't you," said I.

I'll be the first to admit that I like gadgets because they are cool. But at the end of the day, I like them because they get the job done. It's not about 'geek;' it's about communicating.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Jeff! I must admit that it was pretty cool to be on the receiving end of that graph. It spelled out in a clear way what you were looking for (even with your MD-handwriting). Now IF ONLY we could get Excel to combine elements of different graph-types we'd have a winner!

Jeff said...

Thanks Carolyn!