Alternate Universe
The last few weeks were downright weird on the tech front, and it continues to make me nervous as we unleash technologies without some semblance of understanding of the issues and implications doing so creates. I thought the world flipped on its axis three weeks ago. And then came the alternate universe.
Last week, I was looking to connect with our COO, who I thought was working “dim lights” (our term for taking time off, while keeping an eye on work vs. our norm of out of office (OOO) which is unplugged). I was confused when Outsell’s shared calendar showed him as OOO. I checked in with him, and he confirmed that his version of Outlook was marked dim lights, not OOO. Weird.
We looped in our chief of staff. Her calendar was showing him OOO for some days and dim lights for others. Baffling. Three of us with three different versions of our colleague’s schedule.
Shortly afterwards, I emailed her with the following;
I woke up at 2 am and could swear I had an appointment at 12 but now I see Jim booked over it and the original appointment is nowhere.
Her to me:
That’s weird. I saw that appointment, too, and now it’s gone on my calendar, too.
Neither of us had changed it.
Hmm.
Thirty minutes later, in comes a Slack message from one of our analysts: He was waiting for me in Zoom for our 10 am client appointment. I let him know that my calendar showed the meeting scheduled for 10:30… the client confirmed it was showing at 10:30 on theirs, too. But here is my colleague with a different time even though we are all on the same invite. How is this even possible?
I was beginning to think Outlook had become like platform # 9¾ in Harry Potter and was concerned, because while IT was troubleshooting the problem, an upcoming trip with 11 family members was looming and there could be no chance the trip calendar could turn into scrambled eggs. Not with five different plane itineraries, four dinner resys, and an all-day tour. I decided to put the entire itinerary in Word, skip the calendar, and pdf the document for safekeeping. It was time to pull out the big guns and go old-school. Ridiculous.
We confirmed there were no security issues; we weren’t hacked. Several of us simply deleted our calendars, reinstalled them, and seemingly alleviated the problem. The trip went fine (thank you Acrobat); planes ran on-time in both directions.
But as all this was unfolding, the thing that kept me awake is that Microsoft thinks it’s smart to add ChatGPT to its suite. It can’t keep basic calendar functionality operating without patches and bug fixes, but thinks ChatGPT will be fine.
Three times in the past week I’ve read/heard/discussed with people I trust that the founder of OpenAI wishes to make millions of jobs obsolete and believes in basic universal income to shift the basic unit of economic power out of individuals’ hands and into the tech elite’s. There’s a lot to unpeel. Let’s start with making our calendars work.