Computer Usage in My Industry

 "No computer skills? Consider yourself NOT hired..."

When computers were invented, they grew like a rapid infection. They quickly found themselves being implemented in some form throughout any industry you can think of. When I think about places I go within the average week, computers are involved in almost all parts.

    When I go shopping for groceries, for example, there are computers that monitor markets and thus regulate and dictate the prices I'll pay for goods. The Point of Sale software that I am rung up on lives on a computer. There are thousands of computers involved in the work of processing that very payment from my debit card. Even when driving home— my car has many smart computers that monitor its health.

I work in the cellphone industry, where there are many computers involved. Here they function to keep our network going and help us pinpoint where to allocate resources to resolve any network issues. At the store level, most of the process involves computers since we are selling them and troubleshooting them all the time. Some people don't always realize this, but smartphones and even their older feature phone counterparts are computers. They all have processors that have to know what to do with the human input given to them in order to spit out the right results. When this process is interrupted or not working right, I, as a Mobile Expert, have to diagnose and resolve the issue. Sometimes it's as simple as figuring out that the customer has their data turned off or an insufficient plan. In other instances, a customer may have had too many things go wrong, and I may have to completely format the device and reinstall the software. Through these many examples, it is easy to see how one in my industry must be computer literate to be successful.

I've always thought of my job as being stable and unchanging, but when I think about the recent innovations in sectors such as smartphone software, hardware, and AI, that idea may not hold true for much longer. I could see how evolutions in computer hardware could bring about complex software so intelligent that smartphones become increasingly self-sufficient. In a scenario like this, the existence of my current role becomes increasingly difficult to justify if a future phone can repair most software issues itself. Perhaps advancements in AI lead to evolved Siris, Bixbys, and Google Assistants that let customers perform most actions with just their voice or even their thoughts. Not long ago, the smartphones we recognize today were sci-fi staples in the StarTrek movies. My chosen industry will most likely need to adapt to roles that involve programming these very features.