I did not own a smart phone in December 2006, nor did I text on my flip phone. In Philly owning the new RAZR phone was a status symbol among the early 20-somethings. Owning a Blackberry meant that you were a tool with a boring job. My laptop sat on my desk and was always plugged-in. My Facebook account had been deactivated for months because it served no purpose in my post-college life. I was the somewhat-reluctant owner of a 60GB video iPod. Had it not been a gift from a business partner, I may still not own one. Then I arrived in Seattle...

I resisted tech-central Seattle. I will shamefully admit that I thought "algorithm" was a mispronunciation of "logarithm". My first friend in Seattle was a Google employee. She proudly mentioned that she was the third search result when you typed "Gayle". This sounded like magic to me. The search yielded her website which is now called Technology Woman. Again, more magic to luddite me. I had friends with LiveJournal accounts and wildly decorated MySpace pages but did not know anyone with their own website.

My reluctant embrace of technology was due largely to my involvement in Junior League of Seattle and my job in financial services in which personal email was blocked. While serving as a Vice-Chair of the 2009-2010 Premier Event, I would be greeted with 40+ actionable emails when I got home. In order to deal with the flood during the day, I purchased the Blackberry Storm and a Dell Netbook that fit easily into my purse. It was an improvement but still not ideal, I was doing too much juggling between devices...so then I started using Google Docs to track donations from anywhere, and then I learned to store my music on Amazon's cloud, and then I got rid of cable and started using GoogleTV exclusively and so on . . .

Perhaps it's not a total surprise that when I started to think seriously about moving back home to Philly, my job search started with "search engine optimization" instead of my resume. Thank you Seattle.