I’m swamped by communication! I reel from real-time info overload! My every working hour seems to be comm-andeered by more demands for instant attention! New applications appear daily to help me talk, hear, organize, schedule and interact with the people here at PAS.

We have email applications of course. Our local machine email, Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, etc. Zimbra handles the intraoffice/server coordination. Email Center Pro handles our Customer Relations Management and Admin email. Gmail gives us extra connectivity and helps us share Google Docs.

We have Instant Messengers, and naturally we have our own favorites — Yahoo!, MSN, Trillian, Meebo, to name just a few. But in the office environment we try to use the ones that will talk to each other.

Then there’s the RSS feeds so we can track and read our favorite blogs, blasts and blathers, and we have our blog composition/editor apps as well so we can post (as I’m blathering today) and comment.

Not surprisingly, there are the MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn social and business networking sites that we follow and who follow us.

And we yack on Yammer and tweet on Twitter when we need to tell something to everybody.

Our Outlook, Zimbra, Yahoo!, Google calendars keep us scheduled, reminded, prompted overseen, and on time to our meetings, while half-a-dozen To-Do lists pop up reminding us of ongoing tasks.

Chats, VoIP, Skype and the like help me text, see, and talk to any number of folks simultaneously, and have made my desk phone nearly obsolete.

We’re del.icio.us-ed, Stumbled-upon, Live-ed, and Digg-ed, and whatnot-ed.

I’m so well connected, linked, followed, organized, managed, reminded, coordinated, shepherded and maximally-efficiency optimized that I can’t find my computer’s desktop for all the myriad dialogs, pop-ups, screens and windows communicating with me. My status bar has so many icons that it’s an unintelligable polychromatic hodge-podge. Can I name that icon in 2 pixels?

And I haven’t opened a single application yet to actually do my job! There’s not enough system resources left to run a .txt editor. Dang! And just when I wanted to set up a virtual bluebeardgoldtooth wireless ansible link with digitalopticalvoice recognition to my subliminal neural iBrain l’iDiot iMplant.

I guess I’ll just have to request a separate Comm-puter and monitor to keep me connected, and relegate my old computer to actually doing my job.

Steve Lange
zeneeyore editor
Palo Alto Software