When Big Brother is Good

Idea of Big Brother watching your every move is one that most people say they don’t like. Sure, no one wants their every move to be monitored. But when you want to know where your package is, Big Brother reporting that it is only six stops away, just outside your neighborhood is a great thing. I am currently watching an Amazon package get closer and closer to my house. This is the kind of technology I just love.

When I was graduating from college I was offered a job at P&G in sales. I spent a day with their top sales rep in the New England region. Rather than spending her day talking to customers and selling them things I found out that she was manually counting cases of products her customers had on hand, and manually tracking every mile she drove and manually tracking every working minute of her day by one of thirty two different tasks. I turned down the offer because I knew that I did not want to spend half my day filling out spread sheets describing how I was spending the other half of my day.

Manual big brother was tiresome and cumbersome. Automated big brother may be no less the tattletale on the worker, but to the customer it is a wonderful and it does not take time away from the workers productivity as long as they don’t have to manually track themselves.

In the time it has taken me to write this I have watched the Amazon truck with my package on it go from being seven stops away to three stops away. This means I have to wrap up this blog so I can meet the driver at the door and thank him for getting my package to me in such an efficient way.