Nerium Oleander & Technology
A few minutes past noon a man makes his way into a business premise to pick his partner who he had earlier dropped off about 3 hours earlier. He had left home with his son, strapped securely in his car seat.
It was a cool day, with few clouds and perfect weather, and as he made the last maneuver, he started to hear his son speak as they arrived at their destination. He put the car into park, taking his legs off the pedals.?
Then all of a sudden he heard - “Daddy, what is the name of this flower?”.
Right beside where the car came to a stop was a lovely row of flowers along the side of the building and the boy could see it through the car window to his right side.?
Dad turned around, looked at the flowers and had absolutely no idea what kind of flowers they were. Not even a clue!
His son is barely 9 years old - in his learning phase and he looks up to his parents.?He believes they know “everything” and should have answers to all his questions.?
Dad’s first instinct was to find a clever way to answer the question. This was an attempt to quickly ‘get himself out of this one’. But he knew from experience that the young man would not stop at just one question. He keeps probing until he feels satisfied he has gotten all he needs to know and in this particular instance, about “the flowers”.
So what did dad do??
He paused for a moment thinking about what to do and then suddenly, an idea came to him!?
He picked up his phone to run a search on the flower. His search was halted when he realized he had no clue as to what it was called.?
Yes. He could see it had “red flowers and green long leaves” - a search like this would return millions of results!
He ran an image search instead and viola, he nailed it!?
He got spot on the name of the flower and more details to answer any related questions thrown at him.?
He realized that his son wasn’t the only one in the learning phase but he too.?
For this is the first time ever in his over 4 decades of existence he had seen the word.?He had never consciously thought to look up the flower and he had probably seen it over and over in the course of his life.
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His son was happy with the supplied answer and he was happy as well. He realized that both of them had gained.
Without technology, it may have taken days or maybe hours to get this information.?
There would also have been the option of looking for the gardener to ask, or dad would have had to take a piece of the flower to a botanist or a library.?
Whichever option they chose without technology would have entailed more time and research. Would it really have been worth all the efforts to go to this length just to get a flower’s name, knowing you had other urgent and important things to do? Think about it for a moment.?
With technology, it took under two minutes to “solve the mystery”. Also, Dad knew what to do and how to do it.?
While technology is available almost everywhere you turn, the WHAT and the HOW are the twin friends that make technology useful and valuable.?
Five minutes later, Dad’s Partner steps out of the building and heads over to the parked car, gets in and they drive off.?
In the space of five minutes a lot had been learned. The son also learned that there was something called an “image search” and that it is possible to get answers even when you do not have the words to ask correctly.
The flower’s name was Nerium Oleander.
By the way, though a beautiful flower - it should be kept out of the reach of children and adults should be careful around it as well.
One of the ways you can also run an image search is using Google’s App on your phone (Android or iPhone).?
It can be applied to so many things beyond just finding a name to something.
May technology always work for you to make your life easier!