Insights

Building healthy sustainable American Indian Communities is the theme of a broadcast here in Fairfield, Iowa beginning Friday morning September 25th. President Clinton will make introductory remarks at the conference. For more information and to register  go to http://www.americanindiansustainableconference.org/

I grew up on an Illinois farm. Every summer we would head for Minnesota and be completely out of touch with home and work. We didn’t know if the cattle had gotten loose and headed for the cornfields to disappears. We could come home and find a tornado had blown a way the house and barns!

Anything could happen while gone and we would  be blissfully unaware. Our only link to home and work was the telephone and they were hard to find and expensive to use. And upon return ifwe did find out something was amiss, we nailed it back together. We sometimes hired our cousin Marvin Ioder to fly his plane over the cornfields to look for the cattle that got loose to go on their own vacation.

These out of touch times are important to step back and go in the opposite of constantly working and focussing on the project or job at hand. It may seem like we are doing nothing but it’s a common experience that new perspectives are gained on a project and breakthroughs occur. These would not occur so quickly with constant contact and communication.

Those times are gone now with the advent of instant communications. No matter where you are on a mountain top or on a rural dusty road we can always communicate by conference call, twitter, facebook, cell phone, and whatever.

Solution? Simply turn off computers, cell phones, unplug the land line. Or if that’s not possible leave the cell phone, blackberry, and computer at home and head for the hills.

Conference lock is a feature on many conferencing systems that allows you to lock a conference after you start.  It’s particularly helpful after you have done a number count and roll call to establish that everyone on the call is who you want to be on the call. After that you do the “lock down”.  No one can get into the call at that point not even an operator can get in or listen to your call.

All this is wonderful unless you need an operator to identify and clean up a line situation or a quality issue. Of course you can unlock and summon an operator with *0. The truly frustrating thing would be if you as host were disconnected from the call you could not get back into your own call. While land lines seldom disconnect you, a cell phone might. This happens while travelling while on the call and enter a dead spot, etc. Also disconnected guests  cannot jump on board again unless you unlock the call.

Those are the joys and sorrows of conference lock.