Technology is great...until it isn't

Last week, the office of the Phillips County News was buzzing and busy. Catching up on lighter work-weeks following the shop’s closure on Christmas and New Year’s left us scrambling and trying to catch up.

Things were going along rather smoothly, as smooth as can be expected on Monday anyway, and then things started going sideways in a hurry.

It all started with the office fax machine. No I think I have stated my disdain for fax machines in this column a time or two, but I have a hard time remembering so I will say it again...fax machines rot! I would rather use smoke signals, a carrier pigeon or perhaps skywriting as a way to communicate with the outside world.

Well on Monday afternoon, the fax machine in our office decided that it didn’t want to work right and started eating sheets of paper. Nothing could be sent -- not that I tried -- and nothing could be delivered.

Now in most instances, I’m not too worried about the fax machine not working as more often than not, nothing but junk faxes are submitted telling us about bank loans from institutions we have never heard of or male enhancement drugs we’d rather not hear about.

However, every so often a fax comes through -- or at least try to -- that is important and MUST be received. Deb Nicholson tried her dangdest to get a fax to me on Monday, and then most of Tuesday morning. She wanted thank you notes to be in last week’s paper and though we eventually got the blasted machine to work, it was a real struggle (and Deb had a few choice words about technology too, but we will save those for another time.)

It was shortly after the fax meltdown that Pierre’s PC’s went bonkers and stopped working correctly, or at all, and he was forced from his desk and into the main portion of the office to try and get his sports pages completed.

If you have ever owned a piece of “technology” -- you thought I was going to say a different sort of “piece of something”, eh? -- then you know that when things are working the way they are intended, technology is a wonderful thing. On the other side of that coin however, when technology throws you a curve ball for no apparent reason it can be infuriating.

Technology has made it much easier to publish newspaper over the last 10 years (though it has also made it easier to know exactly what our friends are doing, no matter how mundane, 24-7) but sometimes think society has become too reliant on things that most of us don’t know how to fix.

Oh well. I just got an email from my wife telling me that we need cat food and creamer. Twenty years ago I wouldn’t of been privy to said information and would have had to trek back out into the frozen tundra after getting home today in order to make sure Steve has some kibble.

Technology is great...until it isn’t. Thanks for reading and aloha.