VanishingPoint

I am at the METC and am feeling totally disconnected from my building.  While I do have Internet access, out email system is chucking and whirring, and bumping and grinding to a halt due to a recent upgrade.  My only vehicle of communication with my building is Skype with my staff. While this has been a tremendous tool, it does have it’s limits as only the technology staff is Skype enabled.

A further complication of the day is that mid-terms are due today, and with our new District Electronic Gradebook required for the submission of mid-term information I am completely unplugged from knowing if there have been any issues on that front.

In the last two days I have traveled from my home in the Chicago suburbs where I have a tremendously fast Internet connection feeling like I have the world’s resources at my fingertips to a relative’s home in St. Louis where there is no Internet connection (ok, they have dial up… but I cannot connect my tablet through that connection). Even when I felt that I had made it back to the promised land with a wireless connection at the conference, I was cutoff from my building through email crashes… Heck, at one point in the day, I couldn’t even get into my voice mail…

It was amazing the helpless feeling I experienced by being un-plugged from my building and the teacher that I support.  Even though I have complete faith and trust in my staff, I still felt that I was letting them down by NOT being able to even know if they had emailed with an issue.  By the end of the day, I had my assistant copying emails into Skype Chat just so I could see a couple of the bigger issues that came down today.  Even them it was like being blind folded and asked to describe an elephant by what I felt… a strange disconnected feeling for someone who has a cell phone on 24 hours a day, a Dell Axim handheld for email and calendar, a Gateway Tablet for that and everything else, Lotus notes for email and chat, Skype for telecommunications and chat…

By the end of the conference day, I found myself driving to a Saint Louis Bread Company (Panera) to jump on their free wi-fi connection to check and respond to email as the server finally became stable…

Ok, after re-reading this… do I sound a bit informationally obsessed?