After reading, Dr. Larry Rosen's and Dr. Michelle Weil's book, TechnoStress, I realized that the well-rounded technologist generally isn't. Introduce technology without experience in the attendant psychology and you have personal, corporate, and societal problems in the form of TechnoStress.

Stress has been a part of of the workplace since the dawn of history. Ask the workers in King Solomon's mines, the laborers on the pyramids, child textile workers in Victorian England, or plantation workers in the American ante-bellum South if they suffered from work-related stress. Without a doubt the answer would be yes! However, TechnoStress is the child of the electronic age. It is the piling of one technology onto another at a rate that is much faster than human systems are willing to adapt. This is what makes TechnoStress so prevalent and insidious in our modern, techno-dependant society.

Symptoms of technology overload
I am one of those "early adopters" that marketeers consider as the lunatic fringe that will try anything new and technology related. I admittedly love technology, but this still has its price. While technology related stress has many forms, I recently noted one that would be funny if it wasn't a symptom of general overload. To get a password reset from the corporate helpdesk, I had to sit through a long automated phone menu. To get to the option I was looking for, an impersonal voice asked me to hit the 3 key. I did, nothing happened other than my blood pressure went up another couple of points. After sitting through the long message to verify my selection, I followed the instructions again. And again no response and the pressure went up another notch.

Really there was nothing wrong with the technology. After all I can't expect the remote phone system to respond when I punch 3 on my computer keyboard (one of two on my desk) instead of the telephone touchpad. Sensory overload, is hard to spor when you are concentrating on it, but it lurks in the shadow ready to pounce when the defenses are down.

This is a humorous example of one personal technostressor. The value of Dr. Rosen/Weil book is that they have made a twenty-year study of TechnoStress and are able to give context to the thousands of little technology induced alarms that intrude on us each day. Drs Rosen and Weil help identify these nasty intruders, show us how they affect our life and work, and even suggest remedial actions that we can take to relieve ourselves while making our organizations more functional.

Lessons learned from the book
The lessons learned from TechnoStress are:

1. If you know what to look for you can take some of the control in your life back from the machines.
2. If you are a corporate leader involved with introducing new technology, you can make your technology investment (probably a small fortune in today's environment) more effective by carefully considering the impact on end-users.

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