What if you could have as much control over your life as you can over your Intranet or Web site? Think about it. It's been a long day, but you've finally made it home. You put your briefcase down, change into comfortable clothes, and head for the kitchen. Your trusted terrier comes padding up to you with a freshly printed copy of your day's log in his mouth. You sit down with a cup of tea, pat Fido on the head, and review your day's activities.
All in all, not a bad day. You had direct interactions with 29 unique people. Of these 29 unique hits, you had recurring interactions with 14. Each interaction lasted on average four minutes and 31 seconds. Forty-one percent of them were in your office, of which roughly 82 percent involved you seated and the other person standing. You had a higher-than-usual number of hallway interactions, perhaps attributable to the fact that today was payday and everyone was standing around waiting for their checks.
You notice an interesting dip from yesterday's viewing statistics: Your fuchsia Hawaiian shirt received an unusually high number of visual hits, especially during periods in which people should have been paying attention to your scintillating conversation. You also note that interest levels in the conversations declined when you introduced the subjects of paper costs, quality control, and budget forecasts, but they shot up particularly high at the mention of earthquakes, four-day work weeks, and early retirement. You make a mental note -- be sure to mention earthquakes right before delivering bad financial news to company executives.
You turn to the grammar page. Ouch. In just one hour alone, you used the expression "you know" 82 times. You count 17 "um"s in an interaction with your boss. You scan further to note that the conversation ended soon after you asked, "Where's it at?" This early conversation termination activated your Early Conversation Termination agent, which examines the final sentence leading up to the termination, determines the grammar mistake, and provides you with a tidy one-page explanation -- in this case, an error report on misplaced prepositions.
It's probably a good thing that you cannot monitor your life with as much precision as you can an Internet site or Intranet. Log files reveal with remarkable precision what interests and repels users, down to the nearest mouse click. Site-monitoring tools are able to pinpoint every current and potential faulty point in your site -- and then some. We strive to be able to note (in Technicolor, at that) every foible of our technology, yet I don't think we are ready to take such a stringent look at our own inner workings.