I Love Technology

Today I had to sit through an awful work training.  This morning we talked about the changes and improvements that technology has made to the job.  This afternoon we went through different programs on our tablet computers that are supposed to make our job easier.  One of the points that they kept trying to make is that all of the changes in technology are going to help with retention rates.  That is absolutely ridiculous!  While I agree that it does make my job easier to be able to document my visits anywhere and work from home, etc.  These things do not take away from the stress of working with the clients and juggling so many things at once.  Technology doesn't decrease the stress of the job.  The second part of the training went over different programs that are supposed to make documenting easier.  We have Dell laptops that swivel and lay flat and you can write on them like a normal sheet of paper.  Ideally we'd use them during our visits to take notes and then you can convert your handwriting into text and copy and paste into the system.  It is a really cool program, however, I don't take notes during my visits.  It is way to impersonal and makes me feel like I can't just have a conversation with my clients.  Also, if I were to take notes I wouldn't write in complete sentences, so by the time it took to go back and edit I could have just typed out the notes.  The other program we have is called Dragon dictation.  I have an app for this on my phone and have tried it out a little.  This is a program that you speak into and it will write down what you write.  I have the same problem with this program though, I'd still have to go back and edit into complete sentences.  Unfortunately I still have one more day of this!  Fortunately, since it is a training to help us go mobile-which means we can work from anywhere, not just the office-we had to have our laptops, which means I got a lot of work done on court reports and monthly evals.

For real, I do love technology, and I do know that my job would be so terrible if I still had to write out all of my notes by hand and rely on my office phone to get a hold of my clients.  At the end of this long day all about technology I opened my LDS Gospel Library App on my iPhone and it had me download a new version.  On this new version's load screen it gave me this scripture: Romans 15:4, "For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope."  This scripture reinforced the things that I have recently been studying in my scripture study.  And it came to me through technology.  Pretty cool.