Essential gadgets

Toys for the boys (and girls!)

What do you need to keep you ahead of the game?

Almost certainly, you will have a mobile phone. Don't forget to turn it off as you enter a hospital, so you are totally uncontactable. In the old days, you had to turn it off in case it interfered with vital patient monitoring equipment, or more importantly, the WRVS tea lady's hearing aid.

In addition, you need an electronic brain in the form of an iPad.

This is far superior to a paper based organiser, simply because of the amount of add ons available for it. It's fun and it opens up whole new vistas for spending money on totally useless apps and accessories.

Once you get over the initial embarrassment of getting it out in public (fnarr, fnarr), the iPad becomes invaluable. Really, it does. Honest.

Also when you get yours out, it's amazing how many others appear. Most customers own one these days. For some reason, most are shy about using it and will automatically say, "My wife bought me this for Christmas and I've only just worked out how to turn it on."

Remember, your life is in their hands.

It is likely that your company will provide you with a laptop computer, preloaded with an out of date version of Microsoft Office, plus some bespoke territory management and sales reporting software. Head office will be working with a different version of Microsoft Office and will insist on sending attachments in a format totally unreadable on your laptop. In addition, they will think nothing of sending a multi-megabyte PowerPoint presentation as an attachment that takes hours to download via your mobile connection.

The bespoke territory management software will be full of bugs, constantly crashing your computer or iPad. You will probably find that it takes around fifteen minutes to enter each call you make, along with a brief report of what you discussed with the customer. Eventually you will realise that time that would be best spent in front of customers selling is eaten up entering call reports into your computer.

The data that you feed into the office will disappear into a black hole somewhere and no-one in the office will be able to extract meaningful reports from it. The reports that are generated will probably be absolute nonsense and will be disregarded anyway.

Given that the company strategy is planned from (and business forecasts are often made from) this data it is a minor miracle that any targets are ever achieved.

Another highly frustrating (but totally understandable) thing about company computers is that IT departments are reluctant to let employees load any other applications on the laptop no matter how much it would be an aid to productivity. The reasons given are that there is a chance that a virus may be introduced or a conflict with the pre-installed bespoke software may occur causing it to cease functioning. Rectifying this user introduced fault imposes an additional burden on the already overworked and under-funded out-sourced IT department based in Manilla.