Murphy's Law

My weekend was filled with opportunities to use many different mediums to communicate to friends and family. First, a little story to explain the title of this blog, before I begin talking about equivocal tasks and rich mediums and interesting stuff like that. Everything that could have gone wrong this weekend…WENT WRONG. On Saturday night my car broke down ($725 dollars later, it will be fixed sometime this week). Also on Saturday night, I walked in the rain a little too long and got a cold. And on Sunday morning, my cell phone decided not to work. Life without my cell phone (a.k.a. the air in my lungs and the blood in my veins) is killing me. It is my number one way of communicating with the world!

Anyways, lack of cell phone made me use other mediums to communicate with the outside world. I had to stay in contact with my mom all Sunday and today, because the auto shop working on my car was going to call her with the diagnosis. I did the opposite of the media richness theory, for I used email (a leaner media) to communicate with my mom about my car (a more equivocal task). However, If my cell phone was working, I would have used the richer medium by calling her. It felt very impersonal and dry using email for such a situation. A simple phone call could have updated me on the status of my vehicle. Instead, I spent most of my day bumming computers off of my friends to check my email. No fun.

Before my ordeal started on Saturday night, I do recall sending one text message before my piece-of-junk phone decided to go into a coma. It was to my friend Vanessa, telling her to meet me at my friend’s house. Not an equivocal task (asking to meet somewhere), I sent a simple text message (lean medium). That way, if she didn’t feel like showing, rejection wouldn’t be so harsh on me or my friend. This instance of communication matches up with the media richness theory, because the unequivocal task of making plans does not require rich media.

All said and done...I just miss my phone.