Virtual Madness

I’m going to make a bold prediction; one day we will live entirely in a virtual world. Frankly I can’t wait.

Work will be done from home, and commuting will be something our grandchildren will look back on and laugh at. The concept of travelling to concrete and glass high rises, in a tube of metal, filled to the gunnels with sweaty human beings, spewing out pollution from the carbon residue of a billion year old forest, will illicit the same response we give to a 1950s film on the health benefits of smoking.

Yes, this new virtual world is the new Nirvana. I look forward to the day I can play my round of golf on a cold, wet, windy day, from the comfort of my bed. It sounds like heaven. All I’ll have to do is slip on my virtual golf kit, select a suitable golf swing from a pre-selected list on my Phone-Interweb-Widget device and go round in 11 under par.

Some people will be ahead of others in arriving at the virtual Promised Land. Take the company I’m working for on the Libyan project – they have a virtual office.

What does this mean? Well, to some this is enlightenment. No one travels to a central point because there isn’t one. Need a meeting? Conference call over the World Wide Interwebby thing. Need to access an important client file to see what the Managing Director likes to be given for Christmas? Simple, computer networks can be accessed from anywhere. What about getting feedback on that presentation? Doddle E-mail is made for sharing.

And they’re not the only ones at it. Take my credit card company. I can ring them and spend virtually all my life in their phone system gathering information. It’s like walking into their office, picking out my file and having a read.

Of course there are some things that don’t, on the face of it, fit into this brave new virtual world. For example, half way through writing this Blog entry I had to go and collect someone from the hospital who had undergone an Endoscopy. For those of you that don’t know what that is, the first three letters of the word are significant. The remaining letters branch from the root word, telescope, and as a final clue I’d like to offer you another word - insertion.

If the truth be told, this highlights a significant problem with virtual worlds. Endoscopies really are pointless if performed on a virtual arse.

In actual fact there are a few flaws with my other two examples too. I’ve spent about 10 days being trained on a piece of software so that I can train people on it in Libya. The training has been delivered virtually. All manner of things have gone wrong, not least the lack of compatibility between the trainer’s computer software and the computer software on the machine I’m using. You could say we are each in the same virtual office, but not the same room. If we were really in the same room the training could have been completed in half the time.

Also, I didn’t enjoy the half a day I spent in my credit card’s virtual world. No office in the real world forces you to make choices on every single aspect of your visit. That would be bizarre.

“Welcome to our office, would you -1, like to enter, 2 - like to leave, 3 – break in through the back door.”

‘1 – enter.’

“Congratulations on entering our building, do you 1 – want to speak to Reg, 2 – want to throttle Reg or 3 – want to club Reg to death

‘3 – club Reg to Death.’

“When clubbing Reg to death would you like 1 – a baseball bat, 2 – a cricket bat, 3 – a plank of wood

Its easy to see how tedious this could get, especially when, after going through 100 layers of options, you’re deposited in India and speaking to Sanjay pretending to be Reg. Further, he will have no idea of the options you've already chosen so you will have to repeat them. This would, of course, not be necessary at all if Reg had answered the phone at the beginning of the process.

Right, now what was I going to talk to you about today? Ah yes, my book. Good news.

It’s virtually finished…