And I don’t mean where one schleps from one happy hour to another imbibing alcohol and laughing riotously. I mean my “favorites” bar or browser menu bar… the one that has the little yellow star next to it. The one that is this old girl’s e-rolodex.
The best LAN administrator ever will tell you that whenever she re-images a machine for me, I am always very fussy about making sure that she carries forward my browser favorites list to the new machine. If I don’t have my favs, I feel like I am blindfolded! I feel like I am trying to type with mittens on. I feel anxious that I am going to get asked a question and not be able to click a button to get the answer for the asker. Some of that anxiety is heredity. Some of it is my competitive side – I want to show that I can find the answer fastest. Some of it is age-related too; I feel I don’t remember what I used to… like this old hard drive behind the eyeballs doesn’t quite have the buffer or RAM that it used to. Can I defrag my brain, do you think?
Or, taking a more positive slant, maybe I remember just as much but in a different way. It used to be that I could remember entire 10 digit phone numbers. Now I just double-click on the contact name in IE. It used to be that I HAD to remember stuff and organized printed files in a particular way. Now I just know where it is on my favorites bar, and how far down I need to scroll to get that info. It used to be that I had to sign on a gazillion different times for each application. Now we have single sign on!
From typing garbled poetry passwords over and over again, I have moved on to a new, most repeated keystroke series of “left click, scroll, left click.” I wish there were a voice-activated application for that. I would name the app, “Fav-io, the bartender.” Hah! And he would serve me up my request on verbal command. I would say “ORA Rate Agreement” and zap, I would be there. Maybe I could even send Favio to my co-workers who are toiling extra hard in my absence.
Then again, maybe this is already a feature in Sharepoint that I’ve been meaning to learn…
Favorites bars are good! I just wish they were more easily portable. And to end, let me reiterate the power of the regular, old-school rolodex where you scribble stuff in pen on cards and file alphabetically on a funny plastic shape. One of the sweetest compliments I had as I was packing up from my previous job was when a staffer asked, “Now that you are leaving, can I have your rolodex?”
