Take my software application -- please!

In this space last week, I regaled you — or more accurately, amused you — with my travel industry vignettes and related misadventures thereof.
And the truth be told, technology isn’t among my core competencies either.

Yes, I can explain the difference between a roofer and a router and valiantly defend my blasphemous use of a Mac over a PC, but anything beyond that and my brain reacts similarly to a garden slug being doused with table salt.

I just shut down.

It’s not that I’m anti-technology, but when my eight-year-old is more versed than I am in various applications, that takes the phrase “learning curve” to precipitous heights.

But undaunted, I traveled — damn, there’s that word again — to Las Vegas to attend my first American  Institute of CPAs Technology Show.
My decision to attend the confab had left me with three options.

Either lose my discretionary cash within minutes at one of the gaming tables and spend the next three days holed up in my room like Howard Hughes, sightsee in temperatures that resembled an industrial-strength convection oven, or attend the sessions in a self-immersion of learning and validate my ignorance in technology.

Now those were interesting choices.

Since I have two daughters who hopefully will attend college, I passed on this city’s traditional games of chance.

I couldn’t envision having to explain to them that the reason they couldn’t attend say, Princeton,  was that in 2004, a dealer brazenly broke up a pair of jacks and drew to an inside straight.

And the prospect of falling victim to heat prostration and spending time in a strange hospital bed didn’t exactly thrill me either. Besides, I’ve already been to Hoover Dam.

Therefore, I probably made the people who sign my paychecks happy by lugging my oversized briefcase to a number of sessions and trying to get at least on a level where I could intelligently converse with my kids.

I absorbed what I could about software comparisons, tech updates and trends, forensic litigation, enough acronyms to fill up a bowl of  alphabet soup, network connections and even the inevitable link between the IT department and Sarbanes-Oxley.

I knew SOX would get in there somehow.

Now, after three days, no one is going to confuse me with a high-level applications guru or a major reseller in terms of knowledge, but I’ve come to appreciate even more a whole new side of the profession.

Now could someone explain to me again this ERP thing?

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