I guess I'm going to have to

break down and get a cell phone.

No, I don't need one all that

often, maybe once or twice a month. And it's easier and a lot cheaper

just to use a pay phone.

IF I could find a pay phone

that works, that is. I went to two different service stations recently

and tried all three pay phones at each store, to no avail. So I gave up

on finding out whether my softball game was rained out, and just drove

to the field.

Technology is the quintessential

blessing/curse one-two punch.

Yes, it's great that we all

have computers at the newspaper now so a piece of copy doesn't have to

be typed on a typewriter, then typed again by a typesetter.

We've eliminated $8-an-hour

typesetters and replaced them with $90-an-hour techies to keep our computers

running. And now we don't have anybody to type all those news releases

that come over the fax machine.

Of course, if everybody would

e-mail news releases, we could eliminate that problem. But there are pockets

of resistance to the technological revolution.

Some folks won't even fax the

danged releases ... they actually put stamps on them and give them to

complete strangers in hopes we'll get the information eventually.

Technology both frees us and

enslaves us. The fax machine itself is a perfect example. It's great that

we can get news releases, advertising copy and all sorts of other information

in seconds without waiting for the mail, but once you have a fax machine,

it's no good unless you publish the number. Then you're at the mercy of

anybody and everybody.

Not that it's that big of a

hassle to throw away a hundred pages or so, per day, of unwanted releases

from out-of-state PR companies. But now we have to provide the paper and

the toner to receive all this flotsam.

And people who don't trust

the technology send the stuff two or three times. Others think they have

a better chance of getting it printed if they send a copy to every person

in the editorial department.

And some not only fax a release

several times, but also e-mail and snail-mail it to several people as

well. If you see the same story show up in two different sections of the

paper it has happened on rare occasions that's probably the reason why.

Another way technology enslaves

us is that once you have the latest model with all the fancy bells and

whistles, three months later you have a dinosaur that computer nerds snicker

at.

You have to constantly upgrade.

We started this paper on a

computer with an 80-meg hard drive. When I got one with 250 megs of hard

drive and 24 megs of RAM, I wondered how I would ever make use of all

that power.

Now I'm wondering if my 500

megs of RAM is enough. My son just bought a G-4 with a gig and a half,

and I'm pretty jealous.

For those of you who continue

to eschew technology and haven't a clue what I'm talking about, the difference

between that first computer and the one my son just bought is like the

difference between a two-drawer file cabinet and the National Archives.

I'm not one of those who stubbornly

hold out and live the simple life. I embrace technology. Then I occasionally

stop and try to figure out why I did.

But unlike true techies, I

don't really understand it. I can zap the PRAM because I have a program

that does it for me, but after I've done it, I don't have the slightest

idea what I did, exactly.

I still think light bulbs are

some kind of witchery, and when I called a phone number recently with

a 404 area code and the person who answered said he couldn't come to the

soccer game because he was in Chicago, it really freaked me out.

Maybe we should take a step

or two back. Like the story that keeps popping up in my e-mail about how

NASA solved the problem of how to get a pen to write in zero gravity.

It took a year of research

and some millions of dollars, much of it recouped by turning the resulting

engineering marvel into a curio purchased by techno-groupies.

The Russians faced the same

problem and came up with a different solution. They called their invention

... the pencil.