Alan Culler

6 years ago · 9 min. reading time · 0 ·

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The Journey of the Late Adopter: Installment 2 My Adventures with Computers

The Journey of the Late Adopter: Installment 2 My Adventures with Computers

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“I’m not a never-adopter, just a late adopter.” I don’t fear all new technology, I just take my time getting comfortable with it. I’ve now gotten quite comfortable with the Lenovo Thinkpad I am typing this on and even with Windows 10, even though I avoided that upgrade for more than a year after replacing my Windows XP machine for what was then a Windows 8 machine. (It probably didn’t help that the 8.1 upgrade froze my machine such that I had to reload Office.)

I’m writing this Journey of the Late Adopter series so that my family, friends, and colleagues who are earlier adopters or those who work with others around change might use me as an example to understand those of us who are a bit sluggish at adopting the new.

For me, novo-adoption, changing to a new way is about comfort. It’s about seeing the utility of the bright shiny new thing, trying it out, experimenting, getting comfortable with it. It is something about personal control.

My friend and colleague, Ric Taylor, and I are working in San Antonio. Ric always rents the car and does the driving. Ric also likes to experiment with new ways of going anywhere. The net result is that, despite the fact that we have been going there for more than two years, I have very little understanding of the San Antonio landscape and roadways. Ric’s driving is fine; I feel safe, but I am always a little uncomfortable in the car because I don’t know where I am, where I am going, or how we will get there. I feel the same way about my GPS. I have lived in New Jersey for 8 years and I started by relying exclusively on the GPS to get around. I am now willfully turning it off to read maps and experiment with getting around and as a result I’m feeling like I’m beginning to know where I live.

I am not uncomfortable with all change. At 30 I sold everything I owned and moved my then wife and  two children across the Atlantic to attend the London Business School. I planned to and did change careers from a booking agent for speakers to a management consultant. When I was 40, I climbed Mt. Rainier, ran two marathons and started a business. At 57 I quit a job, quite abruptly and started to work for myself again. It’s not that I am uncomfortable with the new or unknown, I just like to try to choose the adventure and manage it myself.

One of the adventures of my life that was thrust upon me was my relationship with computers. The evolution of computing hardware and software has pretty well paralleled my life. My mother became a computer programmer in 1956, when she was 48.

My Mom was the daughter of a school teacher. My maternal grandmother, Ola, never attended college, but was teaching school in Hartselle, Alabama from age 15. My mother, Nan, graduated from Florida Southern College, paid for by Ola’s teaching, and became a teacher herself. A couple of years ago, we sold a box with 200 Indian-head pennies that her students had collected bottle returns for and gave her when she married my Dad in 1933.

Nan stopped teaching while the kids were little, which was a long time because we came into the world 5 and 6 years apart. In the interim, my parents had moved to Boston and then to the suburb of Lexington, “which had such good schools.” Money was tight, then, and I gather from my sisters that my Dad was kind of obnoxious about insisting that my return to work.

Nan started substitute teaching. At one point, she came to sub in my class. I chose that opportunity to “act out” and lead a “razz-the-sub” insurrection in the classroom. Nan was not amused. “Alan, at the end of the day, each of these children will go home to their homes. You, on the other hand will have to go home to yours.” I straightened up and quashed the rebellion immediately. “Come on guys – quit it - I’m gettin’ in big trouble.”

Substitute teaching wasn’t very predictable income, but in March of the following year my mother got the ideal sub-job for her. A high school calculus teacher was having a baby and wouldn’t be back for the rest of the school year. When I was in my twenties she told me,

“I was very happy. I boned up on my calculus. I was reading every night. I was learning as much as the students were and the classes were a ball. Towards the end of the year a man came into the classroom to watch me teach. I thought he was from the superintendent’s office and maybe I’d be offered full-time for next year. I turned up the heat a bit and after class he came up to me to talk.”

My mother had retired when she told me this story, but I remember her excitement about her first conversation with Bob. (I don’t remember who Bob was or what the connection was –a father of a student, someone from the church? He definitely wasn’t from the “superintendent’s office.”)

“I was a little disappointed when he introduced himself because he wasn’t from Lexington Schools. He asked me if I’d would be interested in joining a new industry. Well, the school year was ending and Mrs. Talbot was coming back in the fall, so I just said ‘Yes’ without even asking what the industry was.”

Bob was from Raytheon and they were hiring math teachers to become programmers on a big computer in a huge former shoe factory in Lowell or Lawrence, Mass. Nan, took the job. I remember my tour of the building – three floors full of vacuum tubes and I remember some man (Bob?) telling 10-year-old me the story of looking for “bugs” moths and roaches that shorted out the connections between tubes. At some point, this building-sized computer was working on calculations for what became the US space program.

Nan went from Raytheon to Honeywell and the IBM 360 operating system team. Honeywell constantly offered her management roles, which she always declined, “I’ve got 3 children at home and a husband who hasn’t figured out that he is no longer a child. I do quite enough ‘management’ without having to do it at work too.”

So computers paid the bills. They allowed my Dad to “retire early” when computers replaced the linotype job, setting the type for the newspaper he worked for. Computers funded my undergraduate degree in a field as far from math as I could possible get. You’d think I would have had an easier time with computers, but I didn’t. Perhaps they didn’t like me.

Perhaps computers remembered when I made my mother cry by making paper airplanes out of six months’ worth of punch cards. Perhaps the numbers inside remembered my running away from STEM subjects in college. All I know is that computers seem to have given me fits for a lot of my career. I remember more than one IT person saying “What on earth did you do?” In one place I worked there was a sign on the room that held most of the computers: “ALAN CULLER IS NOT ALLOWED IN THIS ROOM!”

For a lot of my early career I stayed far away from computers. My word processing was done by secretaries on IBM Selectrics. The mini-computer in accounting was in a room that was off limits to me – something about an overfull coffee cup.

Then I went to business school; we actually had to learn to program – just BASIC – but I struggled. I spent one night on the computer room floor (the only time I could get access) and I finally got a program to work. Then on the second night, after debugging it and turning it in, I came home at 1:00 in the morning and crashed into bed – I’d had about 3 hours of sleep all week. At 1:15 my then wife woke me to tell me that her labor had started – I said “Try to go back to sleep.” That was not received well. My youngest daughter, Caitlin is lovely. She doesn’t seem like the “computers-got-me-again-kid” that I thought she was as I drove to the Royal Free Hospital in London.

I survived business school and my senior project trying to put a management accounting system for a replica business on Visicalc on an Apple II. Yeah, I know, spreadsheets are not databases – it was a mess. The replica of the Jag XK 100 had 15,000 parts; the Bugatti Royale knock-off had 22,000 – a big mess.

My first real desktop computer arrived on my Boston desktop in 1986, a DOS machine that I could never figure out. We had in office email “Alan, I’ve sent you 3 emails and you haven’t responded.” “Henry, if you want to talk to me my office is 7 steps away from yours.”

The next year, for personal reasons, I worked from home in Pittsburgh and had to communicate via a dial-up chat-room of sorts with Boston and London on one of the green screen DOS machines. I figured it out sometimes. My writing was in long-hand and sent to Boston to be entered into Volkswriter, a pre-Word Perfect, Pre-Word, word-processing software program.

I learned to touch-type between high school and college, but quickly abandoned the idea when it took me two hours to type my first paper that had only taken an hour to write. A “quarter a page” was never too much for me. In 1994, I was still writing with a ballpoint and paying for typing. Then I joined Gemini Consulting.

In 1995, I was given my first laptop and Apple Macintosh 540C. It came equipped with Lotus Notes, email software, and something like PowerPoint – it wasn’t PowerPoint, but it made presentation slides which we printed on clear acetates. I really never needed to open it; we had Randy Munsell, our Mac resource, who did all our presentation work; no one was sending me emails and who knew what was on Lotus Notes?

I put the computer in my shoulder bag and dutifully carried it on planes to St. Louis and back and forth to the client site every day. John Covelli, my first Gemini project manager, called it my “weight-lifting program.”

Sometime in the middle of that project, I started to use the computer. I don’t remember how or why. I’m sure that John Covelli had a lot to do with it – I discovered that the way to learn how hardware or software works is to sit in a small room next to someone who knows how and ask a lot of questions. I learned the Mac. Then we switched to PCs – ARRRGH!

No, DOS now it was a Windows laptop. Clients had been complaining because they couldn’t open our Mac documents. That all made sense. I remember being petrified. What I don’t remember is whether it was hard to learn. I suspect it wasn’t. I also suspect that I had help –Covelli or someone like him. Then I went through several projects where we didn’t have a Mac resource. (Yes, they were still called that even though we were on PCs.) Somehow I learned PowerPoint and Word. (I still suck at Excel, but I’m getting better.)

I rose to be head of the North American Organizational discipline. Now I needed a cell phone. Gemini was still a voice mail culture and I had 65 people in the discipline and it seemed that they all left me a voice mail every day. ” Hello Alan, this is Katie. I hope this message fines you well. The headline of this message is. . .” The Gemini voicemail system had a two minutes per message limit and some people left two or three messages to get through what they wanted to say. I needed to use cab time, driving time (Yeah, I know, I don’t do that anymore.) and lying in bed right before sleep time to get through all my voice mails. I had no technophobic reaction to the cell phone – my need was just too great – and it operated just like a landline. You just had to remember to press end call and not to sit on it in such a way that it called people. (Unfortunately I still have this problem with my iPhone.)

Somewhere in the middle of this time Gemini made the shift to an email culture and I got my first home desktop computer to keep up with emails on weekends. I remember packing My Gemini home desktop and laptop up to ship them to Morristown when I left the firm for Katzenbach Partners and then immediately buying another one, a Windows 98 Dell. I had grown dependent.

Katzenbach Partners gave me a Dell laptop and a Motorola Startac cell phone. They had a department that made PowerPoint slides. I handwrote slides and used “Graphics” the way the partners did sometimes, but lots of times the queues were long enough that I just did my own slides and let Graphics edit them. (Sometimes I even did without editing, which I’ve learned is never a very good idea for me.)

Since I left Katzenbach Partners in 2003, I have worked for myself in a variety of corporate structures: sole proprietorships, partnerships, loose confederations. I have always done my own computer production. (At least I have produced drafts; my wife Billie has a writing and editing business, Means of Support, which I’ve hired and when writing training I often work with instructional designers who have control over final production.) I use the Internet all the time for first-pass research; I still learn new tricks in PowerPoint and Word from working with others closely. I even edit my websites thanks to excellent instruction by Greg Apicella (of Apicella Design) and Concrete5.

I post articles like this one on LinkedIn (In 2016, I also joined beBee, but these are so far my only social media outlets.) I have a smart phone - Apple iPhone 4s - in keeping with my late adopter status. I have a smart TV, which after two years is still smarter than me – only a little Amazon streaming – no Netflix, Pandora, Spotify, produced Vimeos or posted videos on YouTube. But I’m making progress; I know how to program the DVR, thanks to my stepdaughter, Sunny. See, I am working on it.

What do my adventures with computers teach about reaching late adopters or change resistors?

People don’t fear change; they fear loss. For me, it is the feeling of a loss of control. For example, I posted 34 articles on LinkedIn; then they changed the publishing interface. When I posted the first article in this series (ironically) I could be heard muttering “Typical Microsoft. They mess with something that doesn’t need messing with and then they mess it up.” (Or something like that, but a bit less polite.) I felt like I had lost control of the process and it took forever. I think I have mostly figured it out now – we’ll see when I post this.

Understanding utility, the why of the change or what the technology will do for me is the first step. When I saw other ways to communicate (walk into the next office or pick up the phone) I did not learn email. My first cell phone was easy because I knew what it would do for me. I learned PowerPoint to save myself time, especially when I had left things to the last minute before a client presentation on a consulting project.

People learn new technology and change best with help. Techniques I’ve seen work in change, buddy systems, and trouble-shooting teams, rumor control ‘hot lines,’ focus groups, are all people–helping-people initiatives. I owe John Covelli, my children, my wife, Billie, Ric Taylor and a lot of help desk CSRs a debt. I try to pay that forward.

Mostly, late adopters need some time to understand if it makes sense for us. Sometimes it might not make sense. I have no idea why anyone would want an autonomous vehicle – never -I like to drive – except maybe at 4:45 on the Garden State Parkway. Ah, utility. Well, maybe I’ll just be late in adopting – not never, just a little late.




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Comments

Alan Culler

6 years ago #7

#1
Saw your comment again Joanne Gardocki after sending art of Fathers Day in a hammock in my back yard hoe you had a similarly relaxing weekend.

Alan Culler

6 years ago #6

#4
Thanks for your comment, @Joyce Bowen Seems we have shared some struggles with change.

Alan Culler

6 years ago #5

#4
Thank you for your perspective, @Joyce Bowen and your support "embracing change becomes a choice" -even if a reluctant one. :-)

Alan Culler

6 years ago #4

#4
Thank you for your perspective, @Joyce Bowen and your support "embracing change becomes a chpice" -even if a reluctant one. :-)
What a great representation of CHANGE. Throughout my life, I have always muttered to myself, "Change is constant," but I railed against it. I remember being in wonder of the Apple II e, and grinding through to become a PC user. Life is funny. Embracing change becomes a choice.

Alan Culler

6 years ago #2

#2
Thanks for your comment, Jerry, and for "old thumbs" solidarity. For a while I had a Blackberry, which I did type with my thumbs. I gave it up when a global bank client I was working with instituted a "6 second required response" rule -really -regardless of timezones -it was easier for them to forgive me not having a Blackberry, than forgive me because I would turn it off as I slept. Texting on the iPhone I do with one finger -my thumbs are too fat and my guitar picking right thumbnail gets in the way - I text in a sort of limited way with my kids -and sometimes my wife when we're trying to find each other in a crowd. Billie and I do have a no iPhones at the table or in bed rule, which we mostly follow, so the "I wonder if so and so is still alive" questions have to wait until after dinner or the morning. Thanks again Alan

Jerry Fletcher

6 years ago #1

Alan, I'm with you all the way. In some cases I was early to the digit la revolution and in others I'm late. I still don't understand why just because I have a smart phone I'm supposed to be smart about hos to use it. I would prefer to talk on it but it seems whole generations think old thumbs can learn to text. Don't hold your breathe on that possibility!

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