The Internet: Ultimate Time Killer

OMG! What did we do on business travel before the internet? Did we read books? Did we call home? Did we go out? I can hardly remember. I’m out and about a fair amount and I used to judge the quality of a hotel by three factors: How was the shower water pressure, did the TV channel selection include Comedy Central and was the room service burger tasty? Those now seem like afterthoughts (well maybe not the shower water pressure).

When you hear people talk about the quality of their on-the-road experience and the hotels they frequent, they’re just as likely to consider the speed of the Internet access, as they are the points they earn. It’s not just the free Wi-Fi; it’s the signal strength you get on your broadband wireless card. I know I’m not the only one who makes choices based on these two factors.

And why is connectivity so important? We might say it’s about having constant access to our corporate networks and email, but you can get a lot of that on your smartphone. Is it about the ability to hold video conferences and download and send large files? Maybe.

But a more unspoken benefit of having high-speed connectivity is the ability to kill time. Even on the road everyone has downtime. There’s news to read, fantasy football to keep up with, Facebook posts to respond to, awkward Skype sessions to endure and movies to stream. I’ve been a Slingbox devotee since its inception, I can add that to the list, and I’m sure we all have our own.

To say I love the internet as a downtime killer when I’m traveling would be an understatement. You can wile away time in the wee hours of the morning when you can’t sleep, feeling like you’ve accomplished something (when in fact not much) guilt free! But the thing I like best is the discovery. I’m just ask likely to find out how much I need a ceramic kitchen knife as I am to learn about the prospects for a post Qaddafi Libya all with a few keystrokes.

A colleague of mine once said while we were watching a very early e-book demonstration that, “If we’d had e-books first and then physical books, the paperback would be hailed as the greatest invention of all-time.” While there’s some grain of truth to that, when it comes to the internet, there is no substitute.

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