E-Mail, Yes, but This Is Still Only Home Page He Knows

I admit it, I’ve gotten some column mileage out of my reluctance to keep up with technology. You all know the shtick: hip, educated guy but a lovable dunce with anything invented after the pop-up toaster. A timeless bit. Mirth all around. Am I above milking the subject for the cheap gag? Absolutely not.

In the interest of full disclosure, though, I was once in the vanguard of the technological revolution. In the mid-1970s, the executive editor at the paper I worked for took the reporting staff to lunch and asked what our biggest problems were. Open forum, he said. I raised my hand and, with the earnestness that the best and brightest sometimes bring to the lunch table, suggested that the company buy touch-tone telephones to replace our rotary-dial models. Maybe something in the new Princess line, I offered. The few seconds saved with each phone call could make the difference between success and failure in reaching a news source, I said. Especially for people with lots of 8s, 9s and zeros in their phone numbers.

Dead silence around the table. If anything, maybe the sound of a dropped fork clanging against a soup spoon.

My idea was unassailable and directly on point, but the editor looked at me as if I’d spit food on him. Not so much as the courtesy of a “We’ll look into it.” My colleagues, cowards all, picked up on his cue and uniformly acted as if they had just dropped their napkins and had to retrieve them from under the table.

I took my medicine like a man, while silently pondering if a professional career could be carved from your boss’ belief that you were both impudent and shallow. Had I had my things with me, I would have packed them quickly and left.

I’m not being the least bit smug today when I tell you that that newspaper office now has nothing but touch-tone phones. Not Princess models, but I was never wedded to that, anyway. Sure, I was long gone when they got them, but isn’t that always how it goes? The point is, was I ever given credit for being a visionary? Ha. Let’s just say some people in authority have trouble respecting the contributions of underlings.

Who’s to say if my latter-day slowness to modernize stemmed from that foiled foray into futurism. Rejection can be a terrible inhibitor. But it’s true that, ever since, I’ve not been techno-chic. No personal computer, no CD player, no call-waiting, no car phone.

I’m surviving just fine, but there’s relentless social pressure nowadays to upgrade. I read recently that you should never balk at your boss’ suggestion to learn new technology, because that brands you as a goof. A balky goof seldom fares well in the workplace.

So, after roughly 30 to 40 nudges in recent months, I submitted last week to my boss’ instructions to sit for e-mail training (short for electronic mail, I think). I had been perfectly content to communicate with readers via letter and telephone, but that wasn’t good enough for my boss, the Marconi of journalism.

“You gotta get current, man,” he urged, as if my failure to have an e-mail address were the equivalent of wearing a raccoon coat to work. After e-mail, he said, would come Internet training. “Then you can surf the Net!” he said, news so joyous that I presumed from his demeanor I was supposed do cartwheels across the office.

Fine, I said.

The training session was administered by a friend who seemed alternately amused and baffled by my inability to grasp simple commands. I tried to stress the instructional value of repetition to her, pointing out that language like was not inherently meaningful to me.

I sensed she dumbed down her training for me, but that was OK. I eventually figured out how to compose, send and delete a message. My first official e-mail reply was sent to someone in another state. He got it and, just for a moment, I knew how Alexander Graham Bell must have felt when Watson heard him in the next room.

After a fashion, I’m now a dot-com kind of guy.

OK, I was wrong to hold out so long. E-mail reminds me of another breakthrough from the fall of 1968 when I came home from college for the weekend and right there in the corner of the living room where the old black-and-white had sat was a brand new color TV.

Hot diggety. Life didn’t get much better than watching football in color.

And now this--sending letters instantaneously around the country.

Pretty amazing stuff. Kind of makes you wonder if they have any more tricks up their sleeves.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com