A recent article in Wired Magazine describes a Shinto shrine in Tokyo where you can take your electronic gadgets to have them blessed. Apparently Shinto believers think that everything in the world has a spiritual essence and can therefore be blessed. My first thought was of the blessed golf club in the movie Dogma. As I continued to read the story, I could imagine that many of my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers would not be surprised at all to hear of me having one of my gadgets blessed. For the record, I'm not that much in love with my stuff. In fact, I don't usually keep a gadget long enough to fall in love with it. Two recent exceptions are my iPhone (second one after the first took a plunge in a hot tub) and my Kindle 2. Everything else is close to disposable because newer and better things come out each year.

Getting to play with new devices is one of the joys of working in a IT support services company. Most of our customers resist changes to their computer network until they really have to. However, across our customer base, there is always someone who has to be making a change. The result is that the Port-to-Port computer consultants get to constantly work with new stuff -- an opportunity that doesn't often present itself to an internal IT support person. Getting to try out the new stuff allows us to make better recommendations to our IT services customers when they are ready to change some aspect of their computer network.

As far as having my things blessed, the Wired author claims to have kept his blessed cell phone much longer than any previous one. Perhaps there is something to this Shinto belief after all?