Last week I was in a hotel trying to hook up my computer. It was a very, very nice hotel. Ok, I’m going to tell you what it was. It was a Ritz-Carlton, on one of those occasions where you get to stay free where you couldn’t afford to stay on your own. Here is the thing that I don’t understand. How is it in the very nicest hotels you have to pay an arm and a leg for wireless Internet, and at Hampton Inn, it’s free? I don’t get it. But, that’s rambling.
Here is the really cool thing. I had to call tech support to send email out of my hotel room. So I called the front desk. They said, “Just a moment.” And then the next voice that came on had a thick accent to it. They began to tell me what I needed to do to be able to send email out on their server. I got curious and I asked, “Where are you? Where are you calling from?” And they said, “I’m your IT guy in Warsaw, Poland.” And then I thought, “Oh my goodness. Is the world not flat! There are no walls.”
What an experience of the death of distance! Via the Internet, and communication miracles connecting over some blasé, mundane effort such as how to send my emails out from my hotel room, I was connected to someone in Warsaw, Poland. What a small world it’s become. How exciting for anyone who has anything worth saying, anything worth selling, anything worth doing.
Our markets now are not just down the street, not just your city, your state, your region; literally now the world. How cool is it to have an IT guy in Warsaw, Poland? We can connect. The question is, what are the principles that make those connections real, redemptive? There are enough things out there ripping us apart.
By the way, the doors in the new wall-less, wireless, worn-out world swing both ways.