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A big reason I'm interested in tech? Because it solves problems

A Facebook yesterday had a friend of mine pleading rhetorically to a cell phone not to die because if it did, she would lose all the pictures and video she had of her youngest child. This blew my mind. How could you only have pictures of your child on a phone? Why wouldn't you download and back them up? When you know that the internet often (almost always?) has easy solutions to your problems, why wouldn't you search for those solutions?

I'm a guy who's tech support and tech recommender for his fiance* and family, but it's not because I'm a deeply technical engineer type. I know the answers to these questions because I know that computers and the internet often have a way of improving them, and so I go and look for them. Often, these problems aren't even ones that need to be solved, but just ones of convenience. Mint drastically improved my financial life and Dropbox improved backup and transfer. But I looked for them not because I needed to or because I'm fascinated with technology (though, relatively, I am) but because I know that the solutions are out there.

What it really comes down to is even thinking of these things as "tech". Lumping it like that allows people to think that they're not "techy" and so they wouldn't know how to do these things. They would, though, and they don't need complicated technical thinking. They just need the curiosity.

* less than a week left of using this word

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