This conversation originally aired on the March 6, 2020 episode of Tech Radio on SDPB. Listen to it in its entirety here:
Kent Osborne:
Good day, everyone. Welcome to the March 6th edition of In the Moment: Techradio. I'm your host, Kent Osborne and we've gathered the experts to talk tech today. Joining me in the Kirby Family Studio in Sioux Falls, Amos Aesoph. Hey, Amos!
Do you deal a lot in fixing things, like parts and things like that? Have you noticed there's any parts shortages or any hardware things? Are you impacted?
Amos Aesoph:
I don't specifically; however, I did see a communication that came out yesterday or the day before that was sent out just to alert everybody so everybody is just understanding of the information that there is difficulty getting things. Things that would normally be quoted as a two to four week lead time now we're quoting 12 to 16. That's with high expectations that things will resolve themselves relatively quickly and stuff will get started back up. Then of course, there will be that initial onslaught of everybody trying to get stuff that hasn't come over here in a long time. Twelve to 16 is our current estimate, but certainly can go longer.
Kent Osborne:
John T. Meyer joins us from the studio over at Lemonly today. Hi, John, I got a hard question for you.
As we see companies and we're going to talk about this a lot later in the show, but as companies are telling their employees to stay home, what's that do to your workplace culture?
John T. Meyer:
Yeah, it's a fascinating question and at a place like Lemonly, we had a little meeting yesterday to talk about what's our policy in this time of Coronavirus and COVID-19. For us it doesn't change much because we are pretty used to working remote. But yeah, I think companies will be forced into that currently probably aren't ready or built for it. You have to think about how does culture move beyond just four walls. For instance, if we do a food thing and we do some sort of internal lunch or we do a wellness task force, we'll cook a healthy lunch once a month. We then actually send a PayPal or Venmo $7, $10 to our remote employees so they can go out and purchase a healthy lunch. That's just an example of thinking about how culture spans beyond just a building. It's not just a physical place, it's more of a feeling and an ethos. Those are some of the things we talked about.
And you're right. I think it's fascinating right now, remote work is going really get a litmus test here from a lot of companies who maybe aren't used to it, but now are going to be forced into it. It'll be really interesting to see what happens.
Kent Osborne:
We'll delve a lot more microscopically into that in a little bit. Jeff Litterick joins us from Pierre. When I think of state government, I think of this big machine that's got policy books full of stuff. As a crisis comes about, this is not new. There have certainly been floods, there have been other viruses and other things. Have you noticed any difference in reaction to this, or is it just get the playbook off the shelf and work from that because that's the tried and true thing?
We may have lost Jeff. Or maybe taking time to think, to ponder that. But what I can tell you is, there are policies in place certainly. They're not published anywhere because they're kept fairly secret for obvious reasons. People would not be thinking about this for the first time.
Amos Aesoph:
No, and the type of policies that you're probably referring to and correct me if I'm wrong here, but would be things that relate to disaster recovery. And disaster recovery can fall into a lot of different areas and the thing that my mind or most people always go to is what happens if the building goes away, or there's a tornado or there's a flood or something like that? But certainly pandemics and epidemics and these sorts of things can affect it as well because if you're in a situation where your employees can't come to work, now what are you going to do? How are you going to have that business continuity so that things continue to move forward? You lose out on the minimal amount of dollars possible and still continue to move forward.
That's actually one of the big issues that people are questioning right now. Is if you aren't already in a position to have 100% of your workforce working remotely, when it comes time to do that, is the infrastructure that allows them to work remotely going to be able to handle all of those workers? In some cases yes, and in some cases, no. So we certainly have lots of customers who are ramping up, who are putting in more VPN connections and bigger boxes to be able to handle more traffic and that sort of stuff. But certainly, there are playbooks to go by. What happens when we can't work at our facility? That's whether it's a flood, a fire, or a pandemic. Hopefully people have that jotted down, written out and have tested it. Because if they put it together 15 years ago when the company first started and it's a completely different ballgame today, it might be a little bit tougher.
Kent Osborne:
I believe Jeff is back with us. Let me revise the question a little bit. In your opinion, how positioned are we and not just state government, but I guess in general, to make this major shift from working at a desk or in a cube to at least for let's say... The CDC is saying two weeks. They came out yesterday and said, "You're going to be impacted for a couple of weeks, be prepared." I spoke with a woman last night that works at Microsoft, and they were called yesterday and told, "Stay home, work from home till at least the 25th of March," which is about a month. How well positioned are we to just basically overnight, in software and hardware, for most folks that are working that are information jobs and IT and things like that, how capable are we right now? Do things really need to ramp up for folks? How big of an education are we in for?
Jeff Litterick:
Well, being from state government, you have to also remember there's some people that can't work from home. Your law enforcement, your fire fighters, they don't get the option of being able to work from home, so we have to be able to support everything and that also includes being able to support people that have to come in no matter what. We have contingency plans that are always in place and get updated every time this kind of stuff comes around. The DOT plow driver if it's a snow storm, they're not working from home and really can't. We have a couple of different kind of things.
As far as remote work, one of the things I'll mention right now, is it's very possible. It's actually pretty easy for most organizations. And what's interesting is, Cisco which is in a lockdown, they sent all their employees home, is giving away free webex licenses for team based meetings and working from home for a set time. Google is doing the same for their Google Groups, their paid version. And Microsoft, if you have Office 365, is now giving the paid version of Teams free for six months in relation to help organizations position themselves where they don't need to suddenly go out and buy a whole bunch of more remote type collaboration software. It will be free for the next six months. That's a hopeful sign.
But yeah, as an organization, one of the things we learned real fast was in any kind of disaster, you have to specify your critical people also. Some people are just so critical they just can't work from home or they need to be available to be on site. Those people need to be identified and those people need to be briefed and safety precautions taken and all that kind of stuff, no matter what kind of disaster. When you think about oh, the tornado took out the data center. Well, the tornado [inaudible 00:10:35] town and half your employees lost their homes and actually can't even work remotely. How are they going to work? Or they need to take care of their families because they're off sick. Well, how much work even at home are they going to get done if they are sick? You have to look at it as a whole system in these kind of cases and build a plan around all facets if you really want to be successful when stuff like this hits.
Kent Osborne:
That's a lot of impact, that's a lot of things to think about and a lot of policies to make and write. Thank you for that perspective that there are those workers that are on the front lines. Think of food service workers and yes, it's okay to have your groceries delivered, but you've still got to have the people to do that. You've got to have people to show up and do the work and do the delivery and get all those payments where they're supposed to be. As we think about I guess the comforts of some of these services that have come online in the past few years, that does not mean everyone can work from home.
Amos Aesoph:
That's right. There's some things that just can't be done over the internet.
John T. Meyer:
That's where I feel bad. It's the small business owners, the coffee shops, the restaurants, the retail places that are probably going to feel the pinch the most and to the point where they haven't even really felt it yet. It's going to be downstream months to come, or even quarters to come as we look back on 2020 and maybe how businesses maybe didn't meet their goals or it was harder to keep the doors open. We're lucky at Lemonly. I suspect we'll see an impact even downstream with some of our clients and their budgets. But we can at least keep doing our work because we work on computers and we can work from home. Yeah, I think that's a really great perspective to remember.
Kent Osborne:
John, you had mentioned in an email earlier this week to me, that you wanted to talk a little bit today about really the speed at which technology allows information to travel. Particularly, information around this virus. There have been confusion of facts maybe on Twitter. I shouldn't say the word maybe, there has been a confusion of facts on Twitter. You've got people from the CDC and from government saying different things at different times and so those information systems that we have, the media and social media, tend to be sending out mixed messages right now in some cases. There's a concern about that.
John T. Meyer:
Yeah, I think what's been so fascinating, I want to make sure to be clear about not speaking from a science or a health standpoint in terms of the virus and what I think the severity is or is not. But I do think from a media and tech perspective it's been pretty fascinating. The numbers and the data, it feels unprecedented, but we have had SARS and avian flu, H1N1. We have had these things happen before, these pandemics. But we haven't had them in the 2020 media landscape. Even Twitter, which I think was started in 2007, just wasn't what it is today in terms of all the media companies and now individuals basically becoming media companies of their own with massive followings.
What I found so interesting just in the last two weeks, is the speed in which information has traveled. Some fact, some fiction. The speed in which then how because that information travels so fast, the markets and the economy then also move quickly. Then maybe even thinking about technology from that standpoint. It used to be hey, I'm thinking I might want to adjust my financial portfolio or my retirement portfolio, so I better schedule a meeting, go down to Bob's office, sit down, talk to him. Sign the paperwork, he'll put in a trade two days late... Technology's changed that too. We saw this week Robinhood, which is an app that lets you buy and sell stocks basically with a touch of a button from your phone, they had a lot of angry users because they had outages. It was over flooded and the app wasn't able to scale with all the demand that was going on because people were trying to either buy the dip or sell the stock, or whatever their goals were.
I just think you're seeing a lot of hysteria, truthfully. Some rightfully so and some probably misplaced, but because of the speed in which technology has changed our world.
Kent Osborne:
That's some good examples. I find it interesting that in the early days of this crisis, the jokes that were going around. It was named the coronavirus, so obviously all the memes are about beer and one beer in particular. Of course, their sales tanked for completely ridiculous reasons.
Amos Aesoph:
There was a... Gosh, I forget where I saw it, but last night I saw some news examples, some sample news stories where they were talking about questions that people had. Some of the questions were, "Is it a good idea to gargle with bleach? Will that keep the coronavirus away?"
Can I get the coronavirus from eating Chinese food? Just absolutely ridiculous ones that one would hope that people were being silly and trying to put some humor into it, but at the same time there's just so much misunderstanding on what the coronavirus is and how you get it and how you can stay away from it and that sort of stuff. Then of course, we saw in the media as well, some of the racism that has taken place because of people just assuming that if you're from those areas, that you might be infected as well, so we need to stay away from them. Misinformation flows so quickly and as fast as real information does too. But it's difficult to weed through that and who do you believe? Unfortunately, are people actually searching that out or are they reading the first thing that pops up that might be the most spectacular, or outlandish, or worth repeating to somebody else because it's over the top?
Jeff Litterick:
And the information is just so fast. I kept going back to an example earlier this week in that Amazon put out a notice to all the sellers, "Don't price gouge on masks and stuff," and then the news came out later that day about how you really shouldn't get masks and stuff like that because it doesn't protect you unless you really know what you're doing and stuff like that. But by the time those had come out that morning, because I was taking a quick look, everyone had already sold out. Once the information got out, within a couple of minutes everybody online was sold out or price gouging. Stores, I've been hearing about stores if you weren't there within the first hour of opening on this Monday, all the hand sanitizer cleaners, everything sold out, wiped out. The information just flows so much faster that it's about almost a day ahead of what you consider regular news outlets. They're almost a day or two behind in trying to quell stuff that's already happening being out of hand.
John T. Meyer:
Then this is where because of that speed, I'm married to a former journalist, it puts a lot of pressure on media and journalists to feel like they need to catch up and be able to report the story immediately. That's troublesome too. You're seeing on Twitter today, this video going viral from I believe it was Brian Williams' show on MSNBC, a woman tweeted that Bloomberg spent $500 million on his campaign election before of course suspending his campaign this week, and there's 327 million Americans. He could have just given each person a million bucks and still had money left over. These two journalists, Brian Williams and a person from New York Times discussed that tweet and just say how crazy is that? That that could have happened? I mean, they didn't even stop to do the math. That would be trillions of dollars, not millions of dollars, and this is on live TV. It does create this rush, this panic to be the first to run the story without a lot of fact checking and yeah, it's dangerous. It causes the trickle down effects are bigger than we realize.
Kent Osborne:
I saw an interesting cartoon that said, "A week ago we were all political analysts and now all of a sudden we're all epidemiologists," and we're all experts in all this. I found it somewhat alarming and amusing that Tito's vodka, they're made in Texas, has been replying to tweets from people saying, "Hey..." The hand sanitizer sold out so people are making their own and you can legitimately do that with the right ingredients, but one of them is definitely not Tito's vodka. That's what they were saying is, "Hey, Tito's you should be capitalizing on this. You should be selling vodka because you mix this with aloe vera and you got hand sanitizer." It's like, "No, no."
Jeff Litterick:
I've also been hearing this from tequila manufacturers, from all sorts of alcohol manufacturers that people are trying to use them as a sanitizer, and that's not quite correct.
Kent Osborne:
No, it's not. The first series of tweets from Tito's is very much this is what the CDC says, you should definitely not be using our product for this. Now it's getting into I think they're relaxing a little bit and saying, "Enjoy our vodka in a different way." But again, it is not a sanitizer. Is it folks that are just trying to get a rise out of people, or is it folks that are truly a little disturbed by the facts of the day and they're anxious and that's just their personality, is to grasp at anything?
Jeff Litterick:
It's clearly both. I mean, it affected Corona so much, the beer, that I've heard they're actually offering a few million dollars if people change the name of the virus to something else. Because their business is so far off because everyone's scared that they could catch it from that. A little bit of common sense and you realize that's not how you catch a virus at all, it has nothing to do with it. But someone makes a joke and then people run with it, not realizing it's a joke and then it gets out of hand fairly quickly because fear takes over after that point.
John T. Meyer:
Oh, yeah. I mean again, not trying to be a scientist, but COVID-19 really would be the accurate name because we've had coronaviruses in the past. That's more about the origin of where it comes from. But yeah, it's the internet. Once a name or brand happens, off it goes.
Jeff Litterick:
Everyone's seen some of the videos and stuff where people are blaming Chinese people and stuff for this, that have been circulating. It just happened to start there. We've had other viruses like that that have started in the Middle East, that started in Europe. It can start from anyplace. But I've been hearing stories in China, if you're from that province, you can't even get taxi drivers, will not stop for you. They ask you where you're from and if you're from that province they will not pick you up. They will not provide rides. I'm hearing this in Europe and all this stuff, where it's people are being really scared and it's just all over hype, because remember, right now there's still only 100,000 confirmed cases out of the billions of people. Even in China, if they had 10 times that, they have billions of people. It's not as wide spread as people think it is. You do have to protect yourself, but it's not the disaster everyone is thinking it is at this point.
Kent Osborne:
Yeah, yeah. Certainly, in South Dakota we're a little insulated at the moment. Less international travel, less exposure to the risk.
Amos Aesoph:
We do, we've got a little longer period. But the things that we are being affected by and this is for me personally, is I've had two major conferences that I was going to attend be canceled. One in Las Vegas and one in San Jose, and there's other conferences that are happening that are sometimes in the tens if not hundreds of thousands of people that this then takes away that economy that would come from that as well. Flights then get canceled and I have not yet experienced yet myself, but I've heard that there's some leeway on changing your tickets or canceling your tickets through the airlines, which would be awful nice of them. But there are affects that are being felt here even though we might not have any confirmed cases yet.
Jeff Litterick:
I mean, the airlines they'd be happy with that because they're just looking for customers right now. They're saying it's as worse as 9/11 in terms of people not wanting to fly right now. Many of them are starting to cancel flights because there's just nobody on the flights. This is economic. It's probably going to be a bigger economic impact in the end, than it will be a health impact. Especially for most people, because most people it's a mild flu. Unless you are in those risk groups and then you need to be protected. But it's going to affect everybody sooner or later and really doesn't matter where. I mean, it's a steamroller effect. I mean, we know shipping is way down off the West coast, almost 35% off normal traffic volumes, which could impact even raw materials that people in South Dakota need to make other stuff. It can get scarce and then how do you keep those people employed when there's nothing to produce because you can't get your parts and supplies and materials? Hopefully, this clears fast, but it's going to impact everybody. It's just going to be down the line a little bit.
John T. Meyer:
One thing I've been thinking about is what is the... Maybe it's more of the optimist in me, what's the longterm more societal impact of how this changes? The immediate problem is here right at hand, things we just talked about. Being smart and being safe. But you're seeing remote work is going to have this test run here from a lot people. Is the infrastructure in place? Are the tools in place? Are the policies in place? Do some of these conferences go remote or virtual and then even turn out that they have a just fine or even better experience? Who knows? I'm just speculating, but I do think there's going to be a larger societal look at how we live our lives, how we shake hands, how we work together in large groups of people that then we might see a slight change in the way we live. I think that's going to be interesting longterm. That's still very much TBD.
Jeff Litterick:
I've already seen an article about how the handshake in its current form will be eliminated entirely [inaudible 00:30:34]. Well, maybe for a little while, but I don't think it's going to be longterm. People are already discussing that, jumping ahead of the game a little bit. But it will be interesting, because it will have a lasting impact for the better or worse to a certain extent.
Kent Osborne:
Well, with the information age as it is, we'll know pretty shortly the impact on these conferences that Amos was talking about. I'm not sure which ones you were talking about, but I know Facebook has canceled F8, which is their big dev conference and yeah.
John T. Meyer:
Google, canceled theirs.
Amos Aesoph:
Adobe.
Kent Osborne:
Did they? And Adobe, okay.
I know National Association of Broadcasters has their big conference in Vegas. That's a huge conference. And on the tech side, on the hardware/software side of things in the later years, but as far as satellite trucks and Sony always makes a good showing and Panasonic and all the companies that produce cameras and all the media technology, that's the conference. People come worldwide for that and we're starting to see cancellations in other things there. Red Hat canceled their summit, but they're turning that into a virtual event. I guess when I started this out by saying we'll know the impact pretty immediately. As some of these conference turn into virtual conferences, we're going to know the answer. Was this a success? Because we can see how many people come in the virtual door and how long they stay and we'll get reaction to that as soon as it's over.
Jeff Litterick:
One thing that's also interesting, is a lot of companies, and this is some of the cancellations and stuff for South by Southwest, are actually banning travel for their employees. Especially critical employees and stuff, they're actually banning any long out travel. They want their employees to be home and protected and safe, and that's going to also have lasting impact and stuff. Depending on companies look for future epidemics and stuff, how fast they cancel and lock people down. I think Sony's one of the big ones right now that basically has canceled almost all travel plans. I know Amazon, Cisco, and Microsoft has sent all their people home because they actually have people that have been tested positive in their headquarters, at least for Amazon and Cisco. Those employees were told to go home, you're not traveling, you're going to stay home for a month in some cases.
It is going to be a lot of virtual stuff going on and you can tell, because the companies are giving their virtual collaboration stuff away for free for a while to get people interested in it so that maybe they like it and buy it later on after the panic is over. But this is going to have some lasting impact and going to make people think about how they do some stuff in the future.
Kent Osborne:
Corporate travel is certainly one of the very first things impacted. Restrictions on international flying and then lately even out of state travel is being restricted in many cases. Again, you're taking your best employees and not exposing them to possible risks in different places.
Amos Aesoph:
And not only that, but even if they're healthy and they're not the ones who are in the high risk categories, they could still be able to transmit the virus. They could bring it back to somebody who knows they're high risk, doesn't go anywhere, doesn't leave, but has that... What was the Kevin Bacon thing where it was six degrees of separation? Where you've got that degree of separation away from somebody who has that full blown diagnosis to somebody who, I'm not going anywhere, I'm just staying here and working. But you get a couple people that transmit it not knowingly, and that could be a problem as well.
Kent Osborne:
It was the lament of the Microsoft employee I spoke with last night. She's home for the rest of the month, but her husband is still required to go to work. So there goes that moat around the castle thing. He's still needs to go out daily and again, they're in King County so they're where there's been 12 deaths from the virus. They're at ground zero and she feels pretty good about being able to stay home, but then husband who she loves, needs to come home every night. Very interesting, interesting impact on travel and folks' work.
Kent Osborne:
Another interesting anecdote, fan letters and a poll, and an opinion were relayed to the studio that's releasing the new James Bond movie, No Time to Die, no pun intended there, have asked that the company delay the release of the James Bond movie. And the reaction was-
John T. Meyer:
And they already have.
Kent Osborne:
Yes. Till November. That's not just a little delay, that's not just a couple of weeks in the summer when a lot of the prime movies hit. That's a big delay and when you think about that, now I guess there's more time for advertising or for the hysteria to go down or whatever drove the fans to want to delay. I'm assuming they don't want to go sit in crowded movie theaters right now.
John T. Meyer:
Yeah, let's be honest. This isn't because some fans said we should do it, this is a financial move clearly. If today was your blockbuster launch of your film, that's not ideal. You're hoping that hundreds of thousands of people get together in groups in small, contained rooms together. So I think it's a pretty purely financial move. And the way that our media works in 2020, this is probably going to benefit them. It's earned the media now, we're talking about it on the radio. More people are aware of this James Bond movie now even though it comes out six months later.
Jeff Litterick:
One of the considerations and you may see this with big movies and events going on and it's not so much in America, but especially international, because James Bond is a big international hit in China and other stuff. A lot of countries are banning gatherings of people of certain sizes or any gatherings of people. At least for the next couple months, to help stop the spread. You can't have the big premiers, you can't have the big events, the big concerts. I think in France the limit's 5,000 people. Well, how are you going to have a concert unless it's below 5,000 people. Even then, the people with the ban is going to be afraid to do so. I see where worldwide it makes sense for a lot of events. We don't have these bans in the United States, but in Europe and many other countries, there's bans on gatherings already in effect.
Jeff Litterick:
They've actually closed all their schools. All Japan schools are closed for two to three months now. I know there's been two solutions. Postpone the Olympics for a year, or hold the Olympics but don't allow spectators, just televise it. Then you can protect the athletes better because there's a limited number of athletes in their interaction outside of the village and stuff with the normal populace. But they're still hoping to have it but who knows what's going to happen. Japan's one of those very big, epic hotspots that's exploding right now.
John T. Meyer:
Oh, yeah. I was just thinking about that. If it's a postpone or a delay, for those athletes just how sad that is. So much preparation goes into the Olympics and so much timing. If you're trying to peak, you're at your peak athletic performance, the right time and the right place. The impacts continue to go, so many things we haven't even thought of.
Kent Osborne:
Is it better to hold the event and not have the screaming fans, as an athlete? Obviously, it's going to be telecast. Or is it better to delay and have the full experience and have the travel? Obviously, the economic impact of not having those fans there and the athletes and everybody else, supporting crew as well, is going to be immeasurable at this point.
Amos Aesoph:
I was curious if that'd ever been canceled before and it looks like according to Wikipedia it's been done three times and it was all because of war. In 1916, '40 and '44.
John T. Meyer:
Back then, the true purpose or spirit of what the Olympics are about, which is competition, community, connecting the whole world around these events, that is the purpose of the Olympics. But as we know today, it's a money making machine for so many people and so many brands and media companies. What ultimately is the reason we make decisions? It often points toward the money column. I think that's what you're going to see in terms of what happens.
Jeff Litterick:
But the technology is there in this day and age to be able to hold it without the spectators and still get it out. I mean, yes NBC holds the TV rights and stuff, but if they really opened it up you may even get more people enjoying it without the spectators if they did it right. Because the technology's certainly there to do it.
Kent Osborne:
We have placed an article from Wired Magazine on our Facebook page. If you don't use Facebook, that's okay. I think I'm allowed to say, "Go to wired.com," for this article. But it is how to clean your electronic devices, because there are some dos and don'ts if you would like to keep your tech clean. This is something you should be doing anyway, despite COVID-19-
Amos Aesoph:
Like washing your hands.
Kent Osborne:
And what's going on right now. Yes, you should be washing your hands after using the restroom. These are things we should be doing anyway. Well, Wired has come up with some suggestions because it's fairly easy to destroy some of the coatings, there are things put on the glass of your phone to keep them resistant. Water resistant and other good things. It's that thing so you can just wipe it on your pants or whatever and it comes clean, that sort of stuff? If you were to grab a Clorox wipe or a Lysol, whatever. I've actually seen people grab Purell and err. This is not good for technology. It's not good for your monitors, it's not good for really anything. Keyboards and mice are a little different. One: they're not as expensive and the finish on them you're not quite so worried about it. But your actual tech... Yeah, go ahead Jeff.
Jeff Litterick:
But you remember, for germs computer keyboards at your office or home, is considered one of the very top germ hiding, worst infection mechanisms possible actually. Because everyone's touching it, everyone's putting their fingers on it all the time. You need to clean your keyboard regularly, especially if you're sharing it with the family.
Kent Osborne:
Shake it out, blow it out and then there are lots of products out there from the goo that you just roll across that Joel used to talk about, there are other things. My keyboard and my mouse are not that high tech and that expensive if I ruined the finish on them, I'm really going to care. I went ahead and grabbed a thing and-
Amos Aesoph:
A Clorox wipe would be just fine there.
Kent Osborne:
Was just fine for me yesterday, but that's not the simple solution for everything. There's a nice Wired article that talks about how to properly clean your tech and not destroy it. We can't dispense all that information on the air today, nor do we know exactly what kind of phone you have because some phones are more water resistant than others. Some phones are a lot more finicky, you better keep water and alcohol and things away from the ports and the cameras and that sort of thing. It really depends on the phone and the device you have and the manufacturer's recommendation on it. But this is a good starting point and it gets us thinking about these things that again, we should be doing anyway. Maybe every week, maybe every couple of weeks, put a little tickle in your calendar and say, "I'm cleaning the office anyway." We need to clean these surfaces because we've all seen the reports from certain restaurant chains that have touch screen displays and the swabs from those are horrible.
Despite the fact that we've been talking about the virus all hour, that's not the reason why I'm suggesting this. This should be a routine anyway. But certainly it's not a gross reaction to a public health crisis at the moment. But something you should be doing anyway to keep your devices clean and keep you safe from lots of things. Viruses can actually live on glass on the surface of your phone, certain bacteria and viruses, for up to 96 hours. Again, we're not just talking about one particular strain. This is a lot of bad things.
Amos Aesoph:
That's several days.
Kent Osborne:
That's several days. Not saying you need to store it in a pack of Clorox wipes or anything, but just take the necessary steps to keep your surfaces clean and your tech will like it too because it'll probably run better.
Amos Aesoph:
Will thank you later.
Kent Osborne:
If it's been cleaned out and is all fresh and good for you.
Amos Aesoph:
That's right.
Kent Osborne:
Anyway, we have come to the end of another hour of Techradio on In the Moment. Want to thank my guests today. Amos Aesoph from Xigent. Thank you so much for your insights today, Amos. John T. Meyer, certainly loved hearing your insights on the impact of working at home on the workplace and the workforce. We'll keep talking to you about that in the future. And Jeff Litterick from BIT in Pierre, thanks for keeping us safe and all our machines working. Everyone have a great weekend.