Tech and the Working Mom: The Intro

Welcome to Tech and the Working Mom—I’m glad you found me. This blog is dedicated to the discussion of technologies that make life better for working parents, though of course they may be just as good for families where one parent stays home. I can only speak from my own perspective, which is: suburban, full-time working mother of two TechKids under 10, married to  full-time working TechDad who calls me to the study for any and all IT issues. I work in the computer industry, and I’ll do my best to keep any work-related bias in check when it comes to this blog. I come from a family that invested in technology early and often—Intellivision and Betamax recorders come to mind. I have kept this practice in play with my own nuclear family. In addition to numerous gadgets, I have 8 computers in my house of one kind or another, and one desktop I built myself.


No surprise here, but the biggest space hog on my desktops are multi-media: photos, videos, music, podcasts…they take up a lot of gigs and require a number of gadgets to consume them. I’ll cover off in future posts on the best of these gadgets, or at least what you need to consider when buying/updating one for your family, as well as the software and services you need to keep your content safe and accessible. But first, I’d like to take a few moments to eulogize those gadgets that worked just fine thank-you-very-much before they were killed. The top 5:

5) Peapod grocery delivery. I’m sure there are other services out there depending on your location, but not in my area. Peapod is still in business, according the home page, just no longer in my business (so to speak). It let me order my groceries online and delivered them to my house in a reliable window of time. I missed it more acutely after my second maternity leave when I had even less time than before to go to the store, and 3x the fear of doing so with kids.
4) Arcades. They were great babysitters.

3) Polaroid cameras—these were fun for everyone, and you could keep your kids busy while you worked for at least 30 minutes with a Polaroid scavenger hunt, since they took so long to dry.
2) Installed PC DVD players. These are not yet obsolete, but it’s getting that way. If you want a thin and light notebook then you need to be prepared to give up DVDs and spend a lot of memory and money on videos. I always travel with a notebook even when I’m with my kids, and I’d rather have the back-up of playing a movie on any device available than hoping it’s on the one that happens to be available to that kid at that moment,.
1) The Flip. Was there ever a better friend to frazzled families? All the software included, the USB built in so you never had to worry about which firewire to plug in to your computer. Small and intuitive to use. Then Cisco bought its parent company PureDigital and two years later decides to sell it off for scraps, for reasons that are still unclear. Buy them up while you can, as Elaine Benes might say.

What technology do you miss? Speak up in the comments and I’ll try to suggest a suitable replacement.