Technology: Devil or Angel?

I have a love/hate relationship with technology.

Take my computer and e-mail … the computer is a queen until she doesn’t behave. She has the ability to make my day or ruin my life. When she’s good, she’s very, very good, but when she’s bad—well, don’t get me started.

And e-mail is mostly a blessing, occasionally a curse.

With a large family, I absolutely love having the ability to write an e-mail once, press the send button and have the missive shoot through cyberspace simultaneously to four dozen people. The downside is that my e-mail inbox fills with hundreds of messages every day, and although I’ve gotten pretty adept at trashing them quickly, it still takes time that I don’t have. And when I return from a week’s absence, taking out the trash takes some major minutes.

I have a friend who believes that this whole home mortgage mess can be blamed on computers. If there were no computers, he reasons, there would have been no way all the unscrupulous lenders could have processed all those bad loans and so quickly.

It seems to me that computers, cell phones, faxes and other amazing machines have put our lives—both professional and personal—on high speed. Everyone expects you to produce whatever it is now and to be always available. On the other hand, we have unfathomable amounts of information at our fingertips. That’s usually good news for patients and patient care, but sometimes bad news when patients don’t know how to discern valid information from the invalid, the incorrect and the quackery.

I’ve talked with some nurses who curse the COWs (computers on wheels) that they push through hospital corridors because the machines often don’t work well. These nurses complain that they spend more time dealing with the errant machines than they do giving patient care. But those same nurses couldn’t do without their BlackBerrys, iPhones and MapQuest.

I couldn’t begin to list all the technological advances in diagnostics and imaging. For the most part, they allow us care for patients in more precise and less invasive ways, but they can present dilemmas that were once non-existent.

So I ask: Has technology made your life—personal and/or professional—better or worse?

What’s your favorite techie invention?

What technology do you wish never saw the light of day?

Has technology cranked up your pace to an unacceptable level?

Tell us what you think.