How Smart Are You?

How Smart are You?

Proverbs 1:20-33

September 17, 2006

It seems as though, as technology advances, we are getting smarter and smarter. For just a minute, let’s talk about some of the ways that we are smarter today than we were yesterday.

I’m going to make an assumption. I am going to assume that everyone here has had something delivered to him or her from UPS. At one time or another, everyone either sends or receives a package from United Parcel Service. But there are some things about UPS that you might not know.

For example, the UPS air fleet consists of 270 aircraft and is the eleventh largest airline in the world. The company ships 13.5 million packages a day from its Worldport distribution hub adjacent to the Louisville International Airport. Much of the work there goes on during the night when packages are flown in, sorted, and flown back out again in the space of just a few hours.

As amazing as that all is, here is something that boggles my mind. If you have a Toshiba laptop computer that develops a problem during the warranty period, the folks at Toshiba will tell you to drop it off at the nearest UPS store. But UPS doesn’t deliver your computer to Toshiba. Instead, the computer is sent to the UPS hub in Louisville, where specially trained and certified UPS employees will fix it. It is now possible to ship your laptop one day, have it repaired the next, and receive it back on the third day. With the beginning of this special arrangement between UPS and Toshiba, customer complaints decreased dramatically.

UPS does more than deliver packages and repair computers. Have you ever eaten a Papa John’s pizza? Have you ever seen a Papa John’s supply truck on the way to deliver goods to a restaurant? Guess who does the scheduling…that’s right…UPS. Many companies use UPS to schedule the pickup and delivery of supplies so that they are received at just the right time that they are needed.

If you go to www.nike.com to order a pair of athletic shoes, the order is routed to UPS, and a UPS employee picks, inspects, packs, and delivers your shoes from a UPS managed warehouse.

Have you ever ordered some underwear from Jockey.com. If you have, maybe you didn’t know that a UPS employee at one of the company’s warehouses will fill your order, bag it, label it, and deliver it to you.

If you order some tropical fish for your home aquarium from Segrest Farms in Florida, you will receive them in a specially designed package, developed by UPS. The fish are even slightly sedated to help prevent injury and illness during the trip.

UPS works with the U.S. Customs service. They are able to track any of their packages at any time in any corner of the world. They can, for example, find a package sent from Cali, Columbia to someone in Miami by someone named Carlos. When that package arrives, it will automatically be slid off the conveyor belt for inspection.

We’re getting incredibly smart… or at least most of us are getting incredibly smart. There was this one fellow who was discovered by a meter maid as he was standing in front of a parking meter. He was just standing there staring at it “Can I help you?” she asked. “No,” he replied, “I’m just waiting for my gumball. I’ve got five minutes left.”

The world is getting smaller and smaller as people are getting more and more connected. We talk to our kids all the time, whether they are in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Elkhart, or traveling to St. Louis or Washington D.C. We even received a phone call from Dominique during vacation. We were on a ship in the middle of the Caribbean and still got her call. It cost her $27, but we got word of a family emergency immediately. We are constantly only a cell-phone call away.

We live in an incredibly smart world. Toni is talking about getting a new cell phone – one of those which are a phone and an IPod combined. I have a couple of shirts with our Ark logo on them. Rick Loy has that image loaded into a computer at his shop which tells the embroidery machine how to stitch the pattern. Amazing! There are some gas pumps now that are running Microsoft Windows. So now, while you pump your gas you can order a cup of coffee, download music, or check the traffic conditions. It’s an incredibly smart world in which we live.

It seems that everything is networked these days. If I want to, I can type something on my computer and send it to Christie’s printer because she’s on the office network. I know that offices have been using that technology for a long time, but for me it is still exciting stuff. I am often on the computer at home when an instant message pops up from one of my kids because I’m on their buddy network.