You can’t change people. You sometimes can change their targets.
So it is that while prudes will always be prudes — obsessed with the notion that someone, somewhere, might be having fun — what they are prudish about can and will change over time.
When I was a boy, a peculiar amount of time and energy went into prohibiting consenting adults from doing what they wanted to do together. While still popular in some circles, this form of prudishness is far less prevalent these days.
That’s the good news, and if someone ever introduced a Constitutional amendment that reads, “Congress shall make no laws defining crimes without victims or criminalizing acts undertaken solely between or among consenting adults,” I’d expect it to receive widespread support.
The bad news: The prudes are still among us. They live in IT organizations. You can recognize them easily. They’re the ones who say, “Rules are rules, and we have to enforce them.”
It’s an argument that falls apart on even the slightest scrutiny, but scrutiny is something prudes mostly reserve for the behavior of other people. Self-righteousness, not analysis, is their stock in trade.
These thoughts occurred to me as I read my e-mail following last week’s column (“Roving e-mail,” Keep the Joint Running, 7/2/2007), which presented the imprudence of harshly punishing violations of various corporate usage policies (such as using private e-mail accounts for business purposes).
These are the new prudes, and I’m tired of listening to them. Tired, that is, of those who self-righteously deride anyone who uses their PC for more than word processing, spreadsheets, electronic mail, Internet browsing, and the official list of enterprise applications.
We have PCs that can sing, dance, and play the tuba. The list of what they can do for us is like Einstein’s universe: Finite, but unbounded.
As specifics are more persuasive than generalities, here are some applications I use on a regular basis, which make me significantly more effective in my work. Installing them would be, in many companies, grounds for disciplinary action:
- Copernic Desktop Search: Until I migrated to Vista (DON’T DO IT! YOU’LL REGRET IT!!!) Copernic was how I quickly found the files and e-mails I was looking for. I like it even more than Google Desktop.
- InfoSelect: The best personal information manager in the world, so far as I’m concerned. You can use it to create outlines, notes, and flat-file databases and find whatever you’re looking for in an eyeblink. I use it to store all the random bits of information I need to stash somewhere. And, it has a version for Palm, so I can find the information when I’m out and about.
- Desktop Sidebar: Similar to Google Desktop’s sidebar, and infinitely better than Vista’s visually appealing but space-intensive clunker, I find Desktop Sidebar to be a terrific way to keep the weather, stocks, and blogs I track right in front of me. It’s compact, stable, and … nifty.
- Treo/Blackberry: Yes, there are still a lot of companies that don’t let you connect a Treo or Blackberry to your PC or laptop. I can e-mail or call anyone in my Outlook address book from my Treo. Their employees can’t.
- Digital camera: We do a lot of whiteboard work with clients. When the whiteboard is full we take its picture. It’s cheaper than a “smart board,” ubiquitous, and we can store the original electronically. Many companies wouldn’t let us upload the pictures.
- Allway Sync: I don’t know if it’s better or worse than any other file synchronization tool. It works for me. It keeps track of parallel folder trees on different drives or computers, recognizing new files, changed files, and deletions. Simple and painless.
Many companies employ professional prudes to prevent this sort of thing from happening. The theory is that doing so cuts the cost of IT. My theory is that if you buy this theory I can cut your IT costs to zero. Just turn it all off.
Here’s a suggestion: Instead of employing professional prudes to prevent end-users from finding better and more productive uses for information technology, show some leadership instead. Give someone the job of developing the richest set of tools possible for your company’s PCs, and the job of promoting their use.
The job title? I must be in the wrong mood, because everything that occurs to me right now would make at least some readers snigger.
Suggestions?