Five years ago I used this elaborate timeline to illustrate where I saw myself in relation to others in terms of technology awareness. A little out front (at the time) of most of our company… waaay behind the Smart Kids.

For much of the past 15 years I’ve been annoying people (mostly at work) with the latest gadget or –more recently– app. There were early adopters like me; others who would get on board once they clearly saw some proven value to their current job; and still others who jammed their fingers in their ears, chanting “la la la la la la I can’t HEAR you!”

This group always referred to “the Internet thing,” and to this day think Twitter is about what you had for lunch.

But something has changed. People are starting stop by my office or my table at the Coffee Zone and ask for a crash course in all this stuff I’ve been yapping about. It’s as though they woke up one morning and realized, “Shit! I’m way behind!”

Let me hasten to add, there is NOTHING I know that any reasonably intelligent person can’t pick up. But just as you can learn to speek Italian from a series of CD’s, you won’t really understand the language until you live in Genoa for a few years. It’s a cultural thing.

If I had to guess at what has brought this on –if, indeed, something has changed– I’d say it’s the iPhone and the iPad. The web has moved from your desktop (which you leave behind every night at 5 o’clock) to your pocket.

These latter day Luddites are hearing more and more expressions (from customers!) the meaning of which they have only the vaguest idea.

I’m doing my best to purge any “I told you so” from my thinking, but the simple truth is, a lot of these folks won’t catch up. They’re trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide. By the time they scramble up and over… everyone will have moved on.

Ehi, aspetta per me voi ragazzi!

I’m no longer on the company computer network. My iMac is one of only a half dozen or so Macs in the building and I made very little use of the network anyway. And it’s something of an experiment.

I had one of the first personal computers in our company. I bought a Zenith back in the late 80’s and used it for word processing and for tracking affiliate stuff. It was connected to no thing and nobody (except my little dot matrix printer)

The first “network” in the company –as far as I can recall– was a peer-to-peer lash-up in the Missourinet newsroom. No network server, just individual PC’s (Compaq’s with 20 MEG hard-drives) talking to each other.

I don’t remember the exact evolution after that but before long the building was networked and as we added offices throughout the country, they came online. And we now have two full-time network administrators and the network has become critical to the operation of our company.

So why did I cut the cord?

As one of the “web guys,” most of my work has been taking place “in the cloud” for some time. I access company email from a web browser and can do just about everything I need to do, without being on the company grid.

Plus, anytime there was a software upgrade, I had to ask someone with admin privileges to do it for me. Sort of like having your mom come unzip your pants so you could pee. Unpleasant for everyone.

When coworkers need to send me a file that is too large to attach to an email, they drop it on one of the network drives I can no longer access from my iMac. I’m working around that and will eventually get them to put it up on my iDisk, Dropbox or drip.io. Which works in the other direction, too.

For me the Net has become the network. Lots of storage, nearly ubiquitous access, great tools. I feel like a dog that chewed through his leash. Woof!