Interview with my Father - Raffi Kevonian

A sixty-one year old Armenian father, Raffi Kevonian, works endless hours in front of his office computer in order to provide for his family. Though he works tirelessly, he is not a workaholic, and spends substantial time with his family. He is a devout husband and father to his wife and two children. Over the years he has managed to become multilingual, (seven to be exact) and this has helped him in his business affairs since it facilitated his interactions with clients from all four corners of the globe. At a young age, just before his first born son, Ara Kevonian, he suffered from shock and stress due to a string of business problems, which he ironically blames as the reason for his hair loss. Despite his lack of technological savvy, he was one of the first to successfully introduce computers into a business environment when the technology was still relatively new.

I had a good childhood, I was born in a middle high class family, we were two brothers and two sisters and you know a close family usually staying together until they are old enough to get married.  Movies was a big entertainment, till I was twenty years old, that was one of my favorite entertainments and then there was soccer too that was generally played.  We got the television when I was twenty years old, it was black and white and at the beginning people were having difficulty understanding what it was so you was supposed to translate or explain what the television was saying.

I operated maybe ten companies. I was from the first people to implement computers in my business. I can say that the first computer on the market was 32k and I had to wait two months because they said they would receive 64k computers since then now it changed to gigabytes. Maybe four or five of my companies used the computer.  Well we started using for accounting inventory. In those days there was no excel, there was Cabol or some special language which we got some programmers so that they can program according to our needs and at the beginning not to many people knew programming.  I use computers for internet and for business it can be automated. It's a lot of processing functions that reduces time and cost, for example for a long time accounting people used paper and pencil and every time you need to make a copy, you make them on a type writer and then you make a mistake. You then have to wipe it out with a wipe out and you know then you make another mistake while you're correcting it, this was a cycle. So to write a letter you used to wipe out the words and now with a click of the keyboard you can erase, write again, copy and paste and all these things. It was time consuming and impossible to do.  Errors boil down to the person's capacity and the persons how accurate or detail oriented is. I don't think that a detail oriented person is going to go and make a mistake like that. It was a hassle of course, big time and big cost. Now we don't spend much money on computers, three or four thousand dollars a year and we use it on business and games environment. I have no accounting or administrative software on my computer but I still use it every day in our small business we have started.

Internet is a big jump in the technology field, it accelerated almost everything and it is the tip of the iceberg. In ten years we have only scratched the surface because of its potential in the future. The speed like broadband compared to 56k of the internet makes you use more often and facilitates you to get data which slower connections might not even be possible to connect or download the benefit is there. Purchasing and selling items over the internet is safe if it is a known site like amazon.com, ebay, overstock.com which are well known. I run a website in the internet for my business and its building up I can see its potential will grow by time. If you want to be in business in 21st century you can't live without email, unless you want to stop the speed of business world or life. It's like the past when the fax first came into the market people used to use telex.  Telex was a machine that types words, letters like the telegraph. You used to pay per word so you try to abbreviate the phrase, if it is seven to four so you don't have to pay more. Later the fax came where you started being able to transmit some pictures, graphics etc, and now you have the email.

My least favorite aspect is games. Young people sit front of those computers missing physical activities. I'm worried that there might get some health problems in the future, some maybe at the early age have cholesterol, or who knows what kind of sicknesses the may bring because some lack of physical activity.  I found out that there is a new game they call it Wii or something like that. They have some kind of boxing game which there is a little of physical activity but most games as far as I know, there is no physical activity and that is a must. If you were to put it in a balance you will see computers make more good than bad.

When computers were introduced I really liked it. See computers are like a knife with a knife you cut bread, cheese and the throat of somebody, computers can make a lot of good and some people are using for bad purposes. Computers have made a lot of difference and still more difference is yet to come.  In the next fifty years its technology is unimaginable because especially the computer with internet. They are working on smart chips, microchips; it's almost impossible to imagine where we can end up.

Interviewed by Shant Kevonian