Converged Communications, Converged Memories

I was reminded about the wonders of technology, especially converged communications, on a recent trip to New York City. Early one morning, I boarded the train from Grand Central Station to White Plains to meet up with Kay Cioffi, President of TexZen Partners, an enterprise development and strategic marketing group. Kay is a most excellent friend of NCWIT and is helping us reach out to corporations concerning our Workforce Alliance.
My body was on Mountain-Standard-Time and I was pretty jet lagged but I happened to notice, as I looked out the window, that we were passing through Scarsdale, New York. You East-Coast types will laugh, but I had no idea how close Scarsdale was to NYC and to White Plains. I got pretty excited because Scarsdale was home to my grandparents many years ago. I had heard numerous stories as a child about the goings-on at their Scarsdale house; you know, like, “when Grandfather and Grandmother lived in Scarsdale, we used to do this and that,” but I had never seen the house in question.
When I got off the train Kay picked me up. I immediately started blabbering about Scarsdale and she calmly said we could go see the house – it shouldn’t be too far away. So I called my mother (who lives in Texas) on my cell phone. She remembered the address pretty well – only had a few permutations for us to try. She thankfully did remember the street (my mother has a great memory), and she described the tudor-style house. Kay entered the address in her navigation system and, between meetings, we took off to find the house. The drive was quite beautiful – the snow and gentle hills were very holiday-like. Before too long, we found the house.
Now of course, I didn’t bring a traditional camera with me, but I had my cool Motorola RAZR phone with me so all was not lost. Kay dropped me off and went down the block to turn the car around. I pulled out my cell phone, and standing across the street in a snow drift, took a picture of the house. I then emailed the photo to my mother in Texas and to myself, jumped back in the car, and we zipped off to our next meeting.
By the time I accessed my email later that day in the airport my mom had confirmed that indeed, we had located the old family homestead. My sisters were excited to see a picture of the place and my father was reminded of many fond family memories. All good things costing just a bit of time and a byte or two of bandwidth (well, almost). The power of converged communications – I love this stuff.