I need another filing cabinet. The ones I have are thick with notes and clippings and manuscripts. Household budgets are wedged in there with insurance documents, mortgage papers and assorted brochures for who knows what product.
Computer technology was supposed to do away with all this. I truly believed, long before I bought my first computer in 1984, that a computerized database would allow me to do without filing cabinets. All those files of printed material would somehow be transferred to a few dozen floppy disks that could be stored in a space the size of a shoe box.
By now I expected my desk to look like something on "Star Trek," a clear space occupied by just a small computer terminal and a few diskettes. No pens, no papers and no clutter. My life would be simplified.
You should see my desk now, nearly buried beneath stacks of bulging file folders rising up from stressed-out wire baskets. Scissors, paper clips, checks and books fight for space with tape dispensers, stick-on labels and several dozen of those miraculous diskettes.
The hard drive on my computer is in similar shape, crowded with software programs for writing, accounting, planning, spellchecking, address keeping, doodling, scheduling and games playing. Its remarkable memory is nearly exhausted, and I have yet to begin transferring the contents of my file cabinets.
I was thinking of this as I strolled through a farm show at the local exhibition center the other day, passing down aisles of brand new John Deere tractors, Hesston balers and Case windrowers arranged like the pictures in the dealers' flyers. But as I went around the corner onto the show's center aisle I suddenly felt like I was walking through the pages of a Radio Shack catalogue.
To the right were flashy white satellite dishes, shaped like shallow cereal bowls, scooping weather forecasts, grain prices and ag news out of the skies. To the left were rows of full-color computer terminals busily managing imaginary dairies and cattle ranches and spud farms. "Save time and money," read a sign overhead.
I visited booths selling cellular telephones and two-way FM radios. No matter how far out on the range I get, it seems I can now "reach out and touch someone" if I buy the right equipment and pay the long-distance charges.
Elsewhere, I lingered over fax machines that are going to replace the postal service and overnight delivery companies. And I looked at equipment that's going to revolutionize rural television: 160 channels!
The computer age is coming out of the cities and moving into the country. It's a good thing, as I see it, to be able to keep up with the markets without leaving the farm and for our kids to have access to the same technologies city kids enjoy. It may even be nice to call home on a phone carried in my hip pocket and to see the local news in Chicago once in awhile.
Electronics can improve production, that's plain to see. And, if used correctly, these devices can increase our profitability.
But simplify our lives? Reduce the clutter and confusion? Don't count on it.
