Mike gets sent emails off his boss every morning with a memo, and then Mike sends the memo out to all the people he’s above, this is a social use.
At home Mike uses the Internet for buying guitar strings and other accessories for his hobby because he gets online discounts that are not available in the shops. Mike also researches his place of destination of his holiday before going to the travel agents and booking it. Mike is scared of playing such amount of money over the Internet just incase of hackers and he has no proof he’s bought the holiday. Mike Uses Ebay to bid and buy for golf equipment because he finds it very cheap. Although he gets lots of bargains Ebay can be a very dangerous place because he gets carried away and over spends. One of the worst things that happened to Mike is that he sent off his payment and received no goods but he contacted Ebay and the seller was kicked off the service.
PC Technology
The PC in Mike’s life has become an essential way of living. Mike uses the pc for things like: Microsoft Excel, which will help him to do graphs and Spreadsheets for checklists. He also uses excel to do spreadsheets of the money spent by the company in the last months. It is very easy to use and your work is always very neat and presentable which is very important in a professional job.
He also uses Microsoft Word for many things in the office, these include: writing letters to employers, producing documents and producing posters and advertisements. Microsoft word is one of the easiest word processing packages to use. You can put text, pictures and photographs onto a word document. Mike said Microsoft word is dead easy to use and I don’t have to use a pen and paper.
At home Mike Uses PC Technology for MS FrontPage and loves making web pages and whole web sites, he finds it relaxing and interesting trying to make the next one best than the last. Mike’s son Chris helps his dad with front page and MS-Dos programs such as ESMS+ which is used to simulate football games which is a hobby of both ESMS+ requires a lot of training to use because at first is confusing to get the files named correctly and in the right folder. Mike feels proud of him self when providing people with this free service on the Internet and gets a buzz when he beats his son, which doesn’t happen very often.
Communication
Obviously Mike Uses phones and e-mail to communicate at work, But he also uses Video Conferencing and a Pager. Video Conferencing is where people in different offices can communicate via video link. With this you can see the people you are talking to on a monitor and hear them through the headphone and reply through microphone. This saves companies money and time by staff not having to travel to different offices and using petrol from the company’s fleet car. Sometimes though the sound delay can be a problem, people start talking over each other, and the Internet connection has to be fast that’s why this isn’t used that often, He Only uses his Pager to his on-site colleagues, a pager is just like a ‘texting’ service and this is only ever used on the big sites, he also has a ‘page’ when his lunch is over but by that time in the day his pager’s either in his desk draw or switched off.
Mike uses the landline phone and his mobile phone at home as a use of communication. He finds it very useful when trying to contact people even when he’s on the move, Mike uses ‘texting’ which he find very easy to use, he like sending joke via ‘texting’. It is quick and can be sent to anyone anywhere in the world. But some places around the country don’t have a very good signal and messages cannot be sent and received as quickly as normal, Mike’s mobile phone is on contract so he doesn’t have to worry about credit until the bill comes. He likes taking and sending photos to his family and friends instead of using a camera, which he finds a hassle taking the film to the shop and getting it developed. He socially laughs and shares the photos of his son and wife with his friends at the golf club or in the pub.
Overall ICT has made Mike’s job so much easier to do and he hopes a program is made, one day, where the computer will do all his jobs for him, so he can play golf all day and just monitor the computer every few hours via mobile phone, without the boss knowing!
