seek and find bazaar: The Internet And Google. By Jose Roxas Leveriza

31Aug08 The Internet And Google. By Jose Roxas Leveriza

Yahoo broke me in as far as the internet goes back in my reckoning. It was back in 1992 when I first heard about email. This executive from our company hired for I don’t know what; (I think she was called Communications Specialist something) came flying all the way from Los Angeles. She not only blew a big bunch of cash on the plane fare. Lucky girl got billeted at the Peninsula.

She showed up at the office and reared her pretty head poking her nose into all departments. She came armed with top level clearance from the COO himself, Capt. Vinay Patwardhan back in Vancouver which vested her with authority to reshape the communication capability and flesh out the structural migration of all Teekay Shipping offices strung across the oceans from the old reliable horse, Telex to the new electronic age, email.

I brightened when she made her incursion into my Travel Department. It was after three days of bobbing in and out of the other rooms. She was pretty so she was a welcome sight. Then she threw me the question which soured my day. Do I get email in my computer already? She got me hooked three days earlier. Do I communicate with the tankers in the far flung oceans via email; having switched from the clickety clackety Telex. . .

It was a time when the pager was in vogue and Nokia hadn’t seeped into lifestyles with a wormy stranglehold. The British boss once joked that he will veto my budget for a cell phone. The pager was better because I couldn’t talk back. Thereafter my baptism of fire with the Yahoo came with nerve wracking bungling akin to a school boy’s. It didn’t help that the airline CRS computer we were hooked to followed suit by tripping the light fantastic inside the echelons of the internet.

Yahoo and email soon became second nature that one breezes right through with a flourish. In the beginning they became so encompassing in daily routines that getting addicted to them was a passing in existence with the online connectivity. Pretty soon they became boring. The limits were not too far reaching. Clicking on messages and getting inundated with spam was a new night mare to contend with.

And then these twin boys from Stanford or California whatever (I’m too lazy to look them up in Wikipedia); I once saw their pictures on the cover of Fortune magazine years back. They invented and propagated Google and made life online a beautiful experience. For lack of a proper adjective there is no describing how they made life so different. They came like angels with a slant to the other side. An absorbing flipside of offline, called online.

Googling is like a change of shirts. It is so part of everyday life like breakfast and coffee. In fact breakfast and coffee are better served Google style if you research the wide range of offerings in the internet. Google gives you Delivery.com which can take the roasted coffee of your aromatic dreams right to your doorstep. You don’t have to move an inch from where you sit. That is, my friend, called online living. I’ll have more if you don’t mind. Thanks.