I had an inter­est­ing encounter this after­noon when I met the Postie out in front of the house..  I intro­duced myself and as we chat­ted, he com­mented about some stock he’d pur­chased in a com­pany that I haven’t worked for in over a year.  For the first time I caught a glimpse of a com­pletely dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, a world where the only con­nec­tion to your client is through the outer mark­ings on an enve­lope.  When I real­ized this, I even felt a bit silly for offer­ing my first name.  I’m the only one who gets mail at this address after all, and why wouldn’t I be me?

When I worked at tech­ni­cal sup­port sev­eral years ago, I knew clients by their user­name alone (save a few regular-callers), and often I would recall a plethora of infor­ma­tion about the spe­cific con­fig­u­ra­tion of their com­puter, pre­vi­ous prob­lems and addi­tional email addresses with­out much thought.  Sev­eral of the reg­u­lar clients I could still list off by user­name, but any fur­ther details of their lives are for­ever lost in the Telco archives..

This really high­lights to me what a huge impact our envi­ron­ment can have on our ori­ent­ing sto­ries, our way of see­ing the world. I’m curi­ous now, has any­one else had this expe­ri­ence, or can you relate to the tech-support or postman’s side of the equation?