These ARE the Good Old Days

People often fret about how information technology is changing our lives, and it's easy to fret about the negative aspects, but really, there are always gains and losses. Yes, hardly anyone writes proper letters any more, but people can communicate more quickly and more often! The advent of Federal Express meant that the "grace period" between sending an important package and its receipt his disappeared - and now everybody wants everything yesterday!

Personally, I miss the old impact printers, which took an hour to print out a 20-page document; before background printing, there was nothing else to do while printing was in progress. The great thing was that it forced you to take a break and relax a little - and yet you were actually working, making progress, during this time. Sort of like playing shuffleboard while making your way across the Atlantic on a ship!

Some day, our grandchildren will listen with amazement as we explain that, in our lifetime, the world was such a freewheeling, innocent, Wild West sort of the place that it was perfectly normal for people to:

• Hop into a car and drive where ever they wanted - and if they changed their minds, just go off in some other direction!
• Enjoy a complete absence of advertising in so many places, like our cars, refrigerators, golf clubs, security alarms - you name it.
• Actually fill out paper applications for drivers' licenses, passports, and voter registration. All kinds of people had fake document created, and it sometimes took years to track them down.
• Pay bills after you got the money into your account.
• Tell people "the check is in the mail." People actually believed this! (Well, the first time, anyway.)
  
• Not answer the phone! Really! If someone didn't want to talk, they could just not answer!
• Lie about location! Back in the day, you could fly off to Vegas or wherever, then call in to the office with a groggy voice and say, "I'm not feeling well - I won't be in today." Back in those days, the boss had no way of knowing where you actually were when you called in sick - how cool was that!
• If you passed a pretty girl, you couldn't just query her ID and send her a signal of interest. Nobody had implants back then! If you didn't know her, you had to accost her directly (pretty scary), or follow her around and see who else knew her, and ask them what her name was, and where she lived, and was she married or not. Romance involved a lot of pure legwork back in the day!

So, rather than fretting about these piddly little invasions of privacy we experience today, let's all enjoy the wide-open frontier free-for-all that life today will appear to be in another generation or so! Let's just hop in that car and go... anywhere!

Death and PDFs

In a word: you can scan multipage documents directly into PDF format with Adobe Acrobat Professional, thereby saving lots of time and space.

What is so interesting about this, you ask? Well, for me, it's all tied up with intimations of mortality.

My mother, who died at 92 this year, had many excellent qualities, but it often seemed that her most passionate ambition was never, ever to be a bother to anyone. It this she succeeded at many levels, but one aspect became very clear only after her death. This was not a complete surprise, but as my siblings and I went over her effects, it was obvious that she had already disposed of virtually all her possession in advance. We quickly dealt with the shelf of books, box of photos, and few clothes -- all quite harmoniously, we are all proud to say.

Her example on this particular issue has inspired me. As I think of my own shuffling off and then regard the small mountains of stuff still filling my closets and file cabinets, I can't help wondering what I can do now to simplify the settling of my own pathetic table scraps by their designated heir and assign, whose name is Colin.

In particular, I look at paperwork. Certain personal papers of sentimental interest are understandable, though quantity can be a problem. Where I feel ridiculous, though, is that I have had trouble parting with certain artifacts from my professional life. Clearly, no one on this planet will ever need to review my proposal for a game about the U.S. Presidents that never went anywhere. And yet, it amuses me to recall the optimism that went into preparing it, not to mention the propoal's charming use of the latest technology -- photocopies! Much as I know I should dump the lot, I can't quite part with this documented evidence of personal creativity, however modest.

Enter Adobe Acrobat Professional, the software that lets you create compressed read-only PDF (Portable Document Format) documents that occupy little storage space and can be read on all computer platforms. It's probably done this for years, but I only just discovered that Acrobat lets you scan multiple pages from a scanner straight into a multipage PDF.

This means you can capture that entire proposal electronically, and then throw the original away! You can do the same with correspondence, treasured ticket stubs, wacky birthday cards, even those warm and fuzzy letters from the IRS they told you never to discard. You can zap it all right into the computer, and then haul all those files to the dumpster. Your physical environment becomes freer, larger and cleaner from the absence of all that documentation.

Arguably, none of your heirs and assigns may have the slightest interest in any of your stuff, but at least now they no longer have to make the minimum commitment of hauling boxes home and storing them in a garage or basement. Even if they never look at them, the only imposition is to take home a CD-ROM or two. Everyone has room for those.

Of couse, another advantage of digitizing your personal records that you can hand them over to multiple people. If none of your kids has any interest, maybe one of their kids will stumble upon your detritus and find it interesting. Maybe so, maybe not -- but either way, digitizing records opens a potential door in the future while removing the burden of you or anyone else having to cart around your "stuff" in the physical sense. I highly recommend it!

Coping with E-Z Pass

Computers are marvelous things that bring all sorts of benefits. But have you ever been told by a Customer Service Representative that some perfectly reasonable request of yours cannot be fulfilled because the computer does not allow it? Of course you have - this happens all the time!

At the risk to stating the obvious, computer systems are designed by humans. What a system can or cannot do reflects the priorities and personalities those who designed it and their view of the people who will interact with the system.

For example, take the EZ-Pass system installed on bridges and toll roads over most of the northeast U.S. Now, don't get me wrong: EZ-Pass is a wonderful thing. I love being able to sail through the EZ-Pass lanes on bridges and thruway exits throughout the area. It saves a lot of time, and I'd never give it up.

But there is something one-sided about the way EZ-Pass computers keep track of tolls, accounts, and "replenishments" -- that's EZ-Pass talk for "payments." It seems perfect for collecting money, but not quite as well tuned for the customer experience.

Take the "replenishment" system. EZ-Pass requires a running deposit, presumably just in case you split for the West Coast and never return that little box on your windshield. Staying ahead of cash flow is an understandable business strategy, but unlike most service companies, which bill on a fixed date every month, EZ-Pass deducts more money whenever your balance drops to about 25% of your predicted monthly bill. That's handy for them, since they always have some of your cash. But for us customers, we never know when that automatic withdrawal is going to happen. It might come the day after payday -- no problem -- or the day before, which, if your budgeting skills are like mine, could cause a minor liquidity crisis. If they can do all that fancy predicting, why can't they bill people on the same day every month?

The EZ-Pass website is better than it was. You can now view your account details by logging in with a User Name and Password. When your statement is ready, they can send you an email with a link to the statement, but when you log in this way, you have to enter a PIN number, not your password. Come on folks, make it a PIN or a password, but do we have to remember both?

EZ-Pass computer systems have an acute sensitivity when it comes to recording your charges and collecting your payments. But when it comes to detecting patterns that might save you money, you're on your own.

Somehow I missed the fact that when you sign up for a commuter discount, you have to declare which bridge or road you plan to take every day -- like calling the pocket in billiards. I discovered this fact after changing jobs, so that instead of traversing one bridge 17 times or more each month, I switched to another bridge for my daily ritual. This went on for months before I noticed that instead of 50 cents per trip, I was paying a dollar each time and getting penalized for not using the first bridge! Silly me -- I assumed that going over anything 17 times a month would trigger the discount. But no, if you sign up for one route and then start going somewhere else every day, you have to call E-Z Pass.

Computers are good at keeping track of every little detail. The designers of the E-Z Pass system could have designed the software to detect a change in commuting routine and adjust the discount automatically. I wonder why they didn't. Too much work? Could the loss of unwitting additional revenue had anything to do with it? I can imagine the discussion: "But what if customers complain?" The answer is obvious: "We can just blame it on the computer."