Originally appeared in Computer User

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The idea of information technology, if you will think back, was that machines were supposed to do the rote chores, freeing our tremendous human minds to do more creative things.

But I swear we're going backward. I'm not talking about the poor idiots who think a mouse is a remote. I'm talking about all of us, on balance.

Take the simplest possible thing, the switch from rotary phones to touch-tone. How many wrong numbers did you get in a given week, back around 1980? One or two, perhaps. It was embarrassing to the other party, and he or she apologized up and down for being so stupid. And for being rude -- it was an awful thing to needlessly interrupt other people's lives.

Compare that to today. Yesterday I got seven wrong numbers. Why the increase? For one thing, because it is easier to mix up numbers arranged in a block than in a circle. For another, because touch-tone phones encourage us to hit those buttons so darn fast.

And when you get a wrong number, how often does the other party say "Oh, I'm so sorry"? More often, there is just that baited-breath moment just before the offending party hangs up -- on you!

It is my conviction that people, instead of stepping up to the challenge of high technology, are regressing.

And I think it's caused mostly by design. I have never understood the appeal of cordless phones. The sound is never as good as a corded phone, even with the new 900-megahertz frequency phones. But there is something logical about having a phone anchored to a set spot in your home. Especially if you live with two young nomadic individuals, as I do.

It does not occur to us, in the midst of our peripatetic conversations, to return the receiver to its original place. So the next time the phone rings, it's a game of find-the-phone. I have found it in sock drawers, in the bathroom sink, in the dog-food bin, and on the picnic table in the back yard.

If you have a good ear, you can locate the ring just in time to hear the wrong number hang up on you.

My design idea: connect the mobile half of the cordless phone to the immobile half with a stout length of white plastic clothesline.

Here's another evolutionary bugaboo -- the claim that our children are computer geniuses and we're (anyone old enough to drive) all idiots. Where oldsters study manuals and fret about breaking the machines and the expense of repairs thereto, youngsters just sit down and get to work.

They're intuitive, exploratory, and utterly at home at the computer console, or online.

I don't dispute that I'm an idiot. But I begrudge that children have made a great evolutionary leap forward. The reason kids feel at home with technology is that designers have made today's systems and software so transparent and so easy to use that people without preformed ideas about how technology should work have no trouble booting up and logging on. Never having crashed, they can't help but fly.

In other words, their greater facility is the result of the universal interface they all work from. They never had to sweat through the terrors of installing in the pre-Plug and Play days. Never had to figure out a jumper configuration, or an IRQ interrupt, or a DMA location. Those of us who went before them are all damaged goods from these traumas.

I know, this sounds terribly disgruntled. I'm just some pathetic old hack trying to score points off a bunch of kids.

True enough. But I can't shake this feeling, every time the phone rings, and I finally locate the receiver in my son's guinea pig hutch, and I hear some quavery throat on the other end swallow hard and hang up, that I've just made contact with a leader of tomorrow.

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