Skyping While Driving
My family and I had an opportunity to visit the beach for the weekend. It had easily been a dozen years since our last seaside foray. We were to be gone for the whole weekend and while we expected to leave the beach early Sunday, traffic on the East Coast, particularly on I-95 can be challenging at best. I couldn't guarantee that we'd be home in time to Skype at a reasonable hour.
Knowing that our drive home would be a bit long and potentially prevent me from being able to Skype with Mom and Lyn, I had to figure out an easy option which wouldn't confuse anyone while still allowing us to communicate face-to-face. Fortunately for us all, Skype already solved the problem for us. I simply added the Skype app to my phone, logged in and we were Skype enabled while mobile. Mom had to do nothing different than she normally did.
When they were back from church, she called my cell to see if "now" was a good time. I assured her that I was doing nothing more than sitting there crocheting at 70 miles an hour. We switched over to Skype and started our conversation.
Lyn immediately started to chastise me for speaking on the phone while driving. Through the wonder of technology, I was able to turn the camera to face my husband, allowing Lyn to see that he was driving and I was just holding the phone. Her tone immediately changed as she sang out a hello to him. He was driving and she could see he had both hands on the wheel. We were free to speak and her objections were cleared.
Keeping Lyn's regularly scheduled conversations happening seems to be increasingly important. She counts down the days to that face-to-face even though we may speak a couple of times via phone during the week. Her temperament is more and more testy and going a week without a conversation really strains her as we found out while my family and I took a week off earlier this month. In that case, we had gone to Canada and had very limited cell data allowances.
After seeing the strain the missed week put on her and Mom, I felt it important to keep that appointment this week despite the drive. Fortunately, I rarely travel internationally and, had I thought about it more at the time, I could have worked around that through access to the hotel's wifi. So, going forward, unless we're in the middle of the woods with zero reception (a highly unlikely event for me personally), we should be able to keep our regularly scheduled Skype conversation.
Technology can be a beautiful thing.
Knowing that our drive home would be a bit long and potentially prevent me from being able to Skype with Mom and Lyn, I had to figure out an easy option which wouldn't confuse anyone while still allowing us to communicate face-to-face. Fortunately for us all, Skype already solved the problem for us. I simply added the Skype app to my phone, logged in and we were Skype enabled while mobile. Mom had to do nothing different than she normally did.
When they were back from church, she called my cell to see if "now" was a good time. I assured her that I was doing nothing more than sitting there crocheting at 70 miles an hour. We switched over to Skype and started our conversation.
Lyn immediately started to chastise me for speaking on the phone while driving. Through the wonder of technology, I was able to turn the camera to face my husband, allowing Lyn to see that he was driving and I was just holding the phone. Her tone immediately changed as she sang out a hello to him. He was driving and she could see he had both hands on the wheel. We were free to speak and her objections were cleared.
Keeping Lyn's regularly scheduled conversations happening seems to be increasingly important. She counts down the days to that face-to-face even though we may speak a couple of times via phone during the week. Her temperament is more and more testy and going a week without a conversation really strains her as we found out while my family and I took a week off earlier this month. In that case, we had gone to Canada and had very limited cell data allowances.
After seeing the strain the missed week put on her and Mom, I felt it important to keep that appointment this week despite the drive. Fortunately, I rarely travel internationally and, had I thought about it more at the time, I could have worked around that through access to the hotel's wifi. So, going forward, unless we're in the middle of the woods with zero reception (a highly unlikely event for me personally), we should be able to keep our regularly scheduled Skype conversation.
Technology can be a beautiful thing.
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