Vision: A day out from convergence

The gurgling sound eventually penetrated Harry’s slumber. Surfacing slowly, Harry become conscious of the warm weight of Hector, the Russian Blue curled up on the duvet. His foot had gone to sleep and as he moved it, the unwelcome sensation of pins and needles flowed from his toes to his ankle. The gurgling sound again. Through his befuddled state Harry registered the noise as the coffee machine set to make his breakfast brew. A nagging thought penetrated Harry’s sleepy state. The coffee machine was set to go off minutes before he usual departure to catch the morning commuter to London. A creature of habit, Harry usually decanted the brew into a travel mug and drank it as he drove to the station. Perhaps the machine has malfunctioned, or perhaps it was the weekend and he’d set it without thinking the night before.

Puzzled, Harry reached over to the alarm clock and checked the time. The light blue display showed 7:15. Must be the weekend Harry thought. But no, the clock showed Friday. No appointments. Strange. Harry sat up and took a proper look at the clock. Definitely no appointments showing. There was usually a list of key moments, drawn down from his online diary. There was a small flashing red icon at the bottom of the clock’s display. Harry vaguely recalled that it meant an access problem. Odd.

Concerned that he was behind his morning scheduled, Harry kicked the duvet off, sending Hector sliding over the edge of the bed, to emerge disdainfully, as only cats can, from the piled up duvet. Harry padded across the bedroom to the kitchenette to the fridge. The screen also showed a blank. Harry thumbed the screen, paging through the groceries inventory which was active, to the groceries delivery schedule, which was not. OK, must be some sort of access problem. Irritating but not unheard of. Harry dug out his watch which used a 4G service to access his online profile rather than the flat’s WiFi. Thumbing through the screens revealed the same again, no access to diary. Not even his ICE medical data came up when he thumbed the emergency button on the watch.

Becoming more concerned, not to say irritated, Harry switched on the kitchen screen. Convinced that there must be some local outage, he was surprised to see the usual morning news feeds available. Picking up the pointer, he selected his usual collection of feeds, watching them simultaneously, activating sound from one to another as the ticker on each displayed a story that caught his interest. Momentarily distracted, he forced himself to return to the task at hand. Using the pointer to change screens to his personal profile, he examined his daily schedule. Blank. Nothing. Harry felt his irritation growing. He paged through to where his most recent work documents should have been. Nothing. Now becoming quite alarmed, Harry paged through the timestamps. They should show the presentation he finished last night and the contract he had reviewed yesterday morning, with comments he had sent to Birch and Buckminster, the lawyers. he paged through to his messages, usually at least a dozen waiting for him at this time in the morning. Nothing.

The phone range. Harry picked it up, thumbed accept and spoke, “What?”.

“Where the hell are you” came the curt reply, “We’re due on in 30 minutes and I still haven’t seen the slides”. It was Peter, a one time collaborator he’d been introduced to last month by his networking company.

“Hey Peter, my systems are majorly screwed up this morning, not sure why. The slides should be on my public-business access point. You should be able to pick them up”

“I tried that. I also tried accessing the backups and the deltas in case you’d pulled the final product. There’s nothing there. You might want to know that my vmail and email is being bounced from your addresses too”.

Harry’s rising irritation was now turning to panic, “my messaging’s out? how did you call me?”

“I had to use an IP trace from your call last night, lucky you keep your phone address fixed”

“It’s so I can keep on top of my game worlds when I’m out and about. Damn. Listen I’ve got to go. When and where are we due, I can’t access anything”.

“Half an hour, Starbucks Business Centre on the Strand, I have a room and a screen booked.”

“I’m going to be late – keep them calm and I’ll see if I can recapture the work from last night. Hold fast.”

Without breakfast or a shower and with only minimal attention to matters sartorial, Harry grabbed his tablet and phone before descending two steps at a time to the front door and out onto the street.

Without thinking, he thumbed his phone to bring up his car locator. Parking was dreadful, like most places and he ended up parking on any number of the local streets. Of course, the phone came up with an ‘access denied’ message. Forcing himself to stop and mentally retrace the sequence of events last night, he was pretty sure he’d parked on Milton Street. As he turned the corner into Milton, he was hugely relieved to see his blue Renault, parked half way down the street on the right. Not all was lost. Without thinking, Harry thumbed his watch to unlock the car. The watch would broadcast his public ID to local devices, the car being one of them. Nothing. Sighing heavily, Harry dug through his bag for the car key. It was so rarely used that it had accumulated a coating of detritus from various foodstuffs and lint collecting at the bottom of his bag. It was fortunate he had it at all – he only carried it because comms coverage at his parent’s place out in Sussex was so bad, as he’d discovered the first time he’d visited them at their new place. Gingerly thumbing the device, the car bleeped obligingly and the door lock disengaged.

Clearing the first junction on his way to the station, Harry glanced at the car’s console. Location was displayed but the ETA was missing. Usually the car checked his schedule and calculated his most likely destination. Harry was now being forced to conclude that the problems were not a localised comms problem. With Peter unable to access his public profile and the car unable to pick up his schedule, it looked like a problem with the service provider.

Parking the car had been a further irritation. Forced to walk for some two hundred yards, down to the station office, buying a train ticket and a car ticket with cash, returning to the car to punch the ticket number into the car console. The car park systems would usually just poll the car’s console, associate with his profile and ask to confirm payment. Harry again counted himself fortunate that he’d had the money left over from a deal he’d done with a mobile mechanic who’d serviced his car last month. Usually, he’d survive cashless for weeks at a time.

While on the train, Harry had been able to use his tablet to bring together a rudimentary presentation in about 20 minutes. Not having access to his business archive, meant that the usual visualisers, finance models, videos were unavailable. Although the tablet software was good, it didn’t have the richness of the full cloud version, especially with the variety of plug-in services he’d amassed over the years. In Harry’s mind, he likened it to some medieval scribe, with charcoal and velum.

As the train drew in to the London terminus, his watch vibrated. Glancing at the display, it showed a short message, “You’re running 50 minutes late, shall I inform your guests?”. Harry thumbed the ‘OK’ button. Suddenly startled by what he had done, he looked at the watch again. The days’ schedule had appeared, two meetings, one already started. 18 messages waiting, 48 spam deleted. Retrieving his tablet, he tabbed to where his business profile had been missing moments before. There was last night’s presentation. Not quite believing that the service was properly restored, he dragged the file across from the local repository over to Peter’s business profile icon, now displaying on his tablet with an angry red indicator, drawing his attention to several messages waiting. The ‘message sent’ confirmation flashed briefly.

Harry’s phone rang. Thumbing accept, he heard Peter’s voice, “I see you’re back in the real world. System says you’re 10 minutes away, see if you can make it 5. I’ll start the presentation”. Without waiting for Harry to confirm, the connection closed.

As Harry walked briskly through the ticket barrier, inadvertently paying a travel fine for not having checked in at the start of his journey, Harry skimmed his messages on his watch. Switching to view some of the messages on his phone, the display was bigger, his attention was caught by a message from his primary cloud provider. “Service Outage Compensation”, Harry read. “We apologise for the reduction in service quality you may have experienced. The outage lasted 63 minutes and was due to a power overload caused by a severe tropical storm in Indonesia”. Harry assumed that was where his data must have been at that time. “Your account will be credited by 150 pounds. Please indicate that you accept this as full and final settlement for any conseqential losses suffered by yourself or your businesses”. Harry thumbed the accept icon. Things were looking up.

I predict the use of online ‘cloud-based’ business services within the next 5 years. Also, the apparent convergence of devices, including watches, phones, tablets, etc – all becoming just windows on data in the cloud.

~ by seldon14 on July 4, 2009.