ELLIOTT: Until We Meet Again

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Until We Meet Again
The Travel Technologist · May 31, 2002

Auf wiedersehen, Travel Technologist.

The German word, which loosely translates into "goodbye," actually means "until we meet again." After five years of doing this, I know it's never goodbye until you're six feet under. This is the third farewell column I've had for the Technologist. This is more auf wiedersehen.

It doesn't end here. People will keep using gadgets on the road, regardless of what the pollsters and pundits tell us and no matter what the hits, click-throughs and reader surveys suggest. Travel technology is here to stay.

We'll meet again, but this time we do know where and we also know when. The Travel Technologist will continue to appear as a column called "On The Road with Christopher Elliott" on the USAToday.com Web site, as "The Digital Traveler" in a new magazine published by American Express called "Go" and as a syndicated column on the Canadian Press wire service.

I remember the last time I had to say farewell. The Web site that published the Technologist had just used September 11 as a convenient excuse to shut down. If it weren't for SmarterLiving.com and the Canadian Press, both of which enthusiastically embraced the idea of a weekly travel technology feature, that might have been the end of the road for this column.

That's how it goes with technology. Just when you think all hope is lost - when the battery dies, the hard drive crashes, the wire refuses to make a connection - and you're out of options, the darned gadget shows some signs of life. I could scarcely believe it then, like now. But travel technology, and the highly specialized field of writing about travel technology, is like a cockroach. You can step on it, throw it across the room and kick it. It won't die.

Kicking it sometimes even makes it work better. Trite as it may sound, I've heard from too many technology users who at the end resorted to a swift kick, punch or shake to make the screen flicker back to life again. In much the same way, each time I've written a goodbye column, I've considered it a figurative kick in the pants; it's led to a second chance and has given me a richer perspective on the discipline of travel technology.

It's always a pleasure to pass the benefits of that lesson along to you, the reader. Here's what I've learned:

Be patient. Seems obvious, right? But as a chronically impatient intern at the Los Angeles Times more than a decade ago, patience came in short supply. There, thanks to an antiquated word-processing program running on DOS that was networked to a crash-prone mainframe, I learned the value of waiting on technology. Sometimes it hurt. There were deadlines every day that I desperately didn't want to miss. But I learned. For example, never try to exit from a program by repeatedly hitting the escape key, otherwise you'll reboot the entire system, which will only set you back further. On the other hand, hitting "escape" only once might not work either. The best thing to do is wait - and see if it works. Then, if it doesn't, wait some more. Try again.
There's more than one fix. This was a particularly difficult thing to learn, both professionally and as a tech user. How many different ways are there to reboot a Macintosh computer? To patch into a foreign phone system? To remove unwanted computer files from your hard drive? I didn't know until I was stuck in another country on a mid-career Fulbright fellowship a few years ago, with absolutely nowhere to turn for tech support. No one to help me wire my computer to the Internet. No one to assist with the hard drive. I had to figure it out for myself. And much to my surprise, there were many ways of achieving my objective. After the third cancellation of The Travel Technologist, I erroneously believed the column had to remain one coherent weekly feature, when in fact there were many ways (three, to be exact) to keep the content alive.
Never give up. A lesson I learned very early on from my roommate at Berkeley who underwrote the cost of his MBA by leasing computer equipment, is that you must never give up on your technology. Often, his rental units came back as "broken" when in fact the renter had just put the wrong plug in the wrong socket. Stupid computer? No, probably just an absent-minded end-user. The lesson was re-enforced later as a technology journalist, when readers complained about technology that broke down. A quick call to tech support revealed that they'd missed something obvious, like sliding the battery into the right slot.

So what are the lessons learned by the Travel Technologist in the last five years? Be patient. There's more than one fix. And never give up. It's simple, really, just as most worthwhile lessons are.

I hope to learn more lessons like it in the next five years - and I hope you'll stick around to find out what the future will teach us.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. The Travel Technologist appears weekly on this site. This story was also published on SmarterLiving.com.