Technology Blows

We all budget for emergencies. Businesses allocate a reserve fund. Households have their savings accounts. Individuals sock money away under mattresses. All so they can cope when something unexpected happens. After all, when your car dies unexpectedly, it's a financial expenditure that you have to deal with RIGHT NOW.

But what about the time cost? It's nearly impossible to allocate or reserve 'emergency time' to deal with the unexpected. Businesses, if they're large enough, have support staff on-hand to cope with the day-to-day emergencies that crop up (Assuming there's enough volume of them to justify having staff to be on hand to fix them). But what about small businesses, homes and individuals?

Let me give you an example: yesterday morning, my cell phone died. Big deal. Sure, I was off the 'net for 2 hours while I went to the Verizon store and picked up an immediate replacement. 2 hours I can deal with--just work later at night (and I was up until 1:15am, so pardon my grammar!). But then, it took 3 hours to get the phone to sync with my laptop. And my cell's my mobile office--without my contacts and calendar, I might as well be toting around a brick.

It was the extra 3 hours, the unexpected 3 hours, that killed my productivity yesterday. Meetings were postponed and work was moved until the wee hours of the night. We had the 'tech. emergency' fund that covered the expense of the replacement phone (estimate each phone will last 2 years, each computer will last 3 years, most other hardware 2 years, etc...) but there was no way that I could have budgeted 'emergency time,' or was there?

There's a business model in here to be exploited.

-Shawn