Man vs. Machine

It's funny that this subject came up on my friend Dave Cofell's website as my daughter and I were discussing this very subject just a few days ago. My wife, Louise, was a bit miffed at my daughter, Christina, because she never answered her e-mails. Therefore, as usual, long-suffering Dad had to be the arbiter of the dispute. I happened to be going to Houston, Texas, where my daughter lives so I was charged with the task of finding out what the problem was.

I should probably interject here that I write my daughter letters that go by snail mail around every six weeks. I started doing this as an exercise because I felt that the fine art of written correspondence was declining in favor of e-mail, e-cards, telephone calls, etc.. I do, however, type the letters on the computer as my handwriting is atrocious and I feel stupid printing everything so machines are involved. By the time this visit came about, we had exchanged maybe six letters.

Christy told me that she hates e-mail because she does not own a printer and does not particularly want one. She has a laptop computer that is fairly easy to move around. She maintains a mobile life style and does not want to be burdened with a bunch of stuff that she has to move every couple of years. She told me that she treasures the letters that I send her because they are something she can save and read repeatedly. When the time comes for me to check out of this little hotel on Earth, she will have a written record of me, something that she says is very important to her.

After I quit blushing, I thought about this quite a bit. My mother was quite a correspondent. Whenever she took a trip overseas (or anywhere unusual), she would buy a travel diary or just a small notebook and record where she went and what she did every day she was traveling. She could have done this using a Palm Pilot or some other type of device but she either didn't want to do that or never really thought of it, although she liked tech stuff. At the time, I thought that it was perhaps a good idea but didn't really pay much attention to the practice. After Mom passed away four years ago, I came across these diaries. It means very much to me to be able to read these impressions of hers over and over again. I hope that my kids will want to keep them and do the same. If she had used a handheld or notebook computer, it's likely that these remembrances would be gone forever.

I don't know. Maybe St. Paul's letters to the Galatians and others would have carried the same weight if they had been e-mailed and maybe we would still be reading them today. However, it is also likely that some Galatians or Colossians would have deleted it after reading it. As far as I am concerned, I believe that e-mail is for convenience and letters by snail mail are forever.

Dave McKinney – Parker, CO –

I had this all written out on the computer and then the power went out so I had to redo it on the old manual typewriter and then later, when the power came back on, I scanned it into my word processor and now I have it online... until the power goes out again.

Well, part of that is true. I did, in fact, write this.

I think about this often because I have had some experience with power tools. There was one project that I was working on about 20 years ago, just after I had purchased a router. A router is used to cut spaces into or shapes onto wood. It isn’t usually used to cut through wood although I will admit that I have used it for that purpose. I wanted to cut a void into a piece of wood and then carve a design into the surface I created there. But, due to inexperience and over-exuberance I didn’t tighten something as much as I needed to and ended up cutting all the way through the piece of wood.

And it isn’t that I had never made a mistake with a power tool before, it is just that I really needed this to work out and it didn’t. So I had to go back to my client and request a new piece of wood and explain what I had been trying to do and he wasn’t at all impressed. I carved the new one completely by hand and it worked out fine. But I’d lost 2 days of work by trying to save a few hours time.

Now I try to do what I can by hand and only use the power tools when the task at hand is too big to make hand tools an option, there is something to be said for efficiency. But I really do prefer the hand saws, chisels and planes that I use.

On the other hand, arm, shoulder and back, I sure appreciate having a snow-blower when there is a lot of snow that has to be moved. And I wouldn’t have an online website if it wasn’t for computers and a few other machines.

There are some that say that machines take people’s jobs from them and there are some who say that machines liberate people from meaningless drudgery. I guess it is all a matter of perspective. It seems to me that we have a lot to work on in the realm of equality for all humans before we can say much about machines liberating anyone. Often I think that some machines only encourage laziness, weight gain and noise pollution (leaf blowers come to mind).

But like I wrote, it is all a matter of perspective.

Dave Cofell
Early Feb. 2004