and I don't like it.
Richmond and Backus Co. office, Detroit, Michigan, 1902. This is obviously a law office. A set of CJS's are on a rotary shelf. On the window sill are a set of corporate seals. The bookshelves on the left are barrister cases. The office is sort of a mess, like most real law offices are. Missing, however, is the dread telephone.
This week I started using an iPad.
This isn't because I love the latest and the greatest in technology, I don't. Not at all. In fact, I tend to be a contrarian on it.
This is partially as I just view tools for their utility. I don't understand, for example, why people trade in perfectly functioning cars they own for new ones. The old one would have gotten you from point A to point B just as well in lots of instances.
"Well, it's new!"
Yeah, so what? You spent money on something you didn't need to get a job done, something you already owned did.
M'eh.
But I have a computer in my home. Two actually, as I have my own laptop that I got for work purposes back during the first part of the pandemic. I already had a work issued one, and I frankly can't really tell you know exactly why I thought I needed my own, but I did. It might be because things were really topsy-turvy at the time, and a person with a good workplace laptop risks somebody purloining it for a temporary purpose that become permanent, or in some instances you actually need to in order to run things for trials. Indeed, I took my own and my issue laptop to a trial in August in Denver and I mostly used my own in my hotel room, not my issue one. My issue one I took to court each day with me, but I didn't use it much there.
Anyhow, I never saw need for an iPad, even though my daughter has one and loves it. She uses it for school.
Then, one of my younger confederates at work, upon whom I depend a great deal, bought a surface and started using it as a notepad.
A high-tech notepad.
I was impressed, to say the least.
I'm pretty much afloat in paper all the time, and it's easy to take notes and not recall where they were or memorialize what you need to do from them. This can address this problem pretty efficiently.
And so now I have one, and I used it for the first time yesterday, the day I got it.
It is an improvement, although it reemphasizes my horrible handwriting.
I'd gone to fountain pens due to my poor handwriting, and they do help. This takes me back to writing too fast, so it's retrograde in that fashion. But it's an improvement nonetheless.
And once I figure it out, and I will, it'll do a lot more than that.
When I started practicing law, we didn't even have computers. We got them the first year I practiced, and it wasn't even super clear what we were using them for. They didn't have internet connections, and while the internet existed, it was dial up and all that.
Shortly after that, we did get dial up internet and soon after that, I got a computer myself, with an internet connection. It was actually my second, as I'd had one without a dial-up before that, although why is really an open question.
Soon after that, the "Blackberry" came in, which served various functions for those who had them. I never did, but I did have something similar that was passed down to me by a more senior lawyer who had upgraded to something else on the Afghan Warlord Principal.[1] I can't really recall what the thing did, other than that it stored contacts. It wasn't a phone.
Soon after computers came in I started to type out my own work using them. There was huge resistance to this and I was repeatedly ordered to dictate my work. I did quite a bit of it, but I ended up abandoning that soon after we had computers. Indeed, when I dictated I tended to write out, by hand, what I was going to dictate, first. Anyhow, I was the first in the office to abandon the Dictaphone. Now, I think, there's one semi retired lawyer left who uses a variant of one.
Dictaphones replaced direct dictation, which had been common before that. With direct dictation the author dictated to a secretary who could take shorthand notation by hand, and then that person, usually a "she" in later years, transcribed it using a typewriter. Before that, when secretaries were still "he's", that person usually wrote the document out by hand. People who did that were called "scrivener's" and were hired for their good handwriting. Even today in the law we use the term "scrivener" as a substitute for author, because it's fun.
For notes, lawyers wrote everything out by hand on long yellow legal pads. Many of us, myself included, still do.
But those days are ending.
Dictaphones have gone away, for the most part, and nobody is employed as a scrivener any longer. The era of the true secretary, whose job was taking dictation and doing transcription, is over as well. Scrivener's as an occupation no longer exist.[2].
Where all this leads I can't say, but I really don't like being tied to electronics so much. I do like being able to publish myself, as in here, but I'm at the point, I think, where I'd rather not have to be on the constant office cutting edge of technology. Some people love it, even tough, long term I worry it'll be our destruction. I'm not one of the ones who love it, even though I've been a fairly heavy adopter of it.
On that, however, it's odd how the initial adoption sometimes came by force, and then sometimes obliquely. My first home computer was really a toy from my prospective. I probably played Solitaire on it more than do anything else, but it came with games. My justification for getting it was that it would be a great home word processor and much better than a typewriter, all of which is true.
The internet at home was the same way. It was a toy. Now I have to have it due to work.
I resisted smartphones at first, but at some point it was no longer possible not to have one. How many I have had by now I couldn't say, but it's quite a few. I've adopted to the text world, and I'm glad that it lets me keep up with my kids in college, sort of. And I like having, oddly enough, a little pocket camera, which of course it also is, all the time, something that's reflected on these blogs. And I really like the iTunes feature, oddly enough. Indeed, I had a little iPod before I had an iPhone that I used for music. I think that I started listening to podcasts after I had my first iPhone, and I really like them.
But, given it all, while I don't like romanticizing the past, if I could place me and those I love back a century, before all this stuff, I'd do it.
I'd probably be the only one I know, however, who would.
I wonder, if I ever retire, what of this stuff I'd keep? I don't think I'd keep it all.
Footnotes
1. "The Afghan Warlord Principal". Years ago I saw a photograph of a body of men, all armed, in Afghanistan. They were tribesmen fitted out to fight the Soviets. Some were boys. The boys carried ancient rifles, and if I recall correctly one had a muzzle-loading rifle. One man, squatted down dead center, had an AK47, the only one so armed.
He looked like he was 80, if he was a day.
He had the most effective combat weapon not because he was the most effective combatant, but because he was senior to everyone else. Much technology in any one office setting works the same way.
2. To my surprise, although I shouldn't have been, it exists as a last name, however.
Makes sense.
