Throughout my career I've used various recording devices to gather thoughts, dictate, remember appointments and to gather leads. So much more handy than scribbling a note on whatever material you have available. Paper napkins, bits of torn newspaper, business card and even popsicle sticks have been used. Collecting and sorting through a conglomeration of garbage to find that million dollar customer's phone number is, well, despicable. Initial recordings were done on a portable, yet relatively large standard cassette machine. What could I possibly do with such an old tape recorder in the 70's? Realize that the microphone alone was larger than the entire unit I use today. At home there was the huge reel to reel with no portability whatsoever. There was no DC adapter for powering up with the car's batterery and the C-cells were used up pretty quickly. The technology of alkaline batteries was not widespread and hadn't hit the general public at that time.
Along comes the advent or invent of the mini-cassette which I did not partake of due to their poor recording quality. Manufacturers understood the flaws and soon began marketing the micro-cassette which was a vast improvement. Not quite pocket-sized but getting closer. The "Pearlcorder" became yhe industry leader for the longest time and was well received by professionals including doctors, lawyers and REALTORS.
The Digital age brought with it the silicon transistor and shrunk almost everything we used to miniature. The battery technology rapidly improved too, and lithium ion became the norm for our devices.
Recently I had the experience of riding with another associate who is technically challenged. Now, know that I am not on the "cutting edge" either but have moved away from paper as much as possible. I truly belive that they were forced to buy an SUV just to hold their stash of printouts, listing packets, sales contracts, MLS reports and statistics, you name it they had it. We picked up a fourth person which was interesting because the paper had been moved to that seat when I entered and placed on top of the existing pile. From there, it all made it to the "Cargo" area in disarray. Luckily, we made no more passenger pick-ups.
My point is, imagine the amount of messaging lost in all of these paper transfers. Notes written on almost every paper in the vehicle with no hint of organization in sight. How can you operate your business that way? Now imagine that we were customers. I use a little digital recorder that's voice activated and provides downloadable WAV files. Push 1 button and record. Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, 4, testing. I'm just saying!
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