While in San Francisco this week, I made a quick side trip to Berkeley to have breakfast with economic blogger extraordinaire Brad DeLong. It was Brad's blog that first got me interested in blogging and it was his encouragement that pushed me over the edge to get started.

In addition to having a chance to catch up with Brad and John Ellwood from the Goldman School of Public Policy, I had a chance to have coffee at Peets.  For those of you who don't know, Peets was Starbucks long before Starbucks became Starbucks but, as anyone who has attended UC Berkeley will gladly tell you, much better.  It was heavenly.

I was doing my very East Coast thing of checking my Blackberry every 30 seconds before Brad arrived and, thanks to the time difference, was having an intense e-mail exchange with a client and her counsel.  We quickly concluded that a document had to be redrafted.

It wasn't that long ago that, given the geographic distances between us, I would have had to write the changes out long-hand, dictate them to an assistant, have them typed back in my office in Washington, and then have that faxed to my client.  My client would then have had to retype the fax.  The process would have taken all day to complete and I would have had to cut my breakfast short to make it happen.

Now, however, Brad, John, and I had a wonderful discussion over breakfast and then, while someone drove me to my next meeting, calmly took out my laptop, logged on wirelessly, made the changes, and sent the revised document to my client.  The client then copied, pasted, and sent the new version to where it had to be. It took 30 minutes.

Sometimes, you really do have to stop and marvel at these things even though we all consider them to be commonplace and barely noteworthy.