A Friend Calls from Dubai

I spoke to a friend who called me from Dubai today.  He teaches there at a university.  He called on a popular VoIP service from his computer to my cellphone at a penny a minute.  Pretty incredible.

After talking for several minutes, we remarked on just how remarkable it was to share such a conversation without any technical difficulties, between two points, half-an-earth away.

Amazing technology that most of us take for granted.

It has always blown me away – call me silly.

The company I used to work for had offices in Brussels and Hong Kong.  On Monday mornings we’d have a staff call, tethering together all of us, across all the world’s time zones, to have a “simple” conversation about the week’s upcoming activities.

Every once in a while, during both boring and heated stretches of these meetings, I’d sometimes marvel to myself, “How f-ing cool is this?  I mean, what would Alexander Graham Bell think about his invention?”

Though knowledge has flattened in the past 25 years, rendering the once-amazing now catholic and ubiquitous, the underlying infrastructure that enables us to communicate through the Internet, through telecom networks, through electrical impulses, zeroes and ones – man, how could one not marvel at it?

It’s magic.  A gift.  Let’s not forget that.