Tuesday

A true roller coaster day on Wall Street. It will not be a one day ride.

My Russian cleaning lady was supposed to come today. We had snow and cold, and she may have bailed. But in preparation for her, I did my usual thing of picking up before her arrival. One of the items on my coffee table was the "clicker" for my old Dish system that I replaced with the Direct system earlier this month. It occurred to me that every household must have it's own collection of defunct/outdated/useless electronic gadgets whose time has come and gone. Among such items in my care are:

1. Clicker for a prior TV.
2. Re-chargers for several old cell phones.
3. Clicker for an old stereo set.
4. Two historical radios.
5. Several disposable, basic 4-function calculators.
6. Do Christmas lights count?
7. Two little forced-air electric space heaters.
8. A couple of re-chargers for long-gone calculators.
9. An ice-maker for a once-owned refrigerator.
10. Several things in Mother's stuff.

Notice that this list really doesn't consider any computer hardware. Of which classification I would consider the now-useless Dish receivers sitting in my garage. (We have so much computer trash in our office that we would need a dumpster were we to clear it all out in one trip.)

We continue to struggle with an effort to reduce paper in the office. There have been a number of occasions in recent weeks where we had properly elected with different institutions against their paper statements, only to have staff then print the electronically received information. This is a cultural problem. The older your organization, the harder it is to embrace new systems and procedures. And accountants like the "feel" of paper in hand to "build the file".

I was trained to do tax research in the mid-70's using the paper resources in our Chicago office's tax library. Following a series of references/citations, I would often have several reference books opened to pertinent pages and stacked in front of me on my desk. Now, you can actually conduct much more thorough research using similar methods, but by stacking "windows" on the computer screen. It took me a long time to get past the need to have all those books in front of me to feel like I was following a proper protocol.

Some of our older clients will never have an ability to operate on an electronic basis with their tax and financial planning data. They may be able to pay their utility bill through an automatic draw at the bank, but most are not comfortable or capable of sending tax information through a computer. Some are. Most aren't.

The generation of my kids will not have this same problem. They never knew the old ways. But by the time they are my age, the then new systems may force them into things that we can barely imagine today. After all, when Captain Kirk ordered, "Beam me up, Scotty", we thought the concept to be outrageous fantasy. (Kirk's follow-up line about the absence of intelligent life probably doesn't apply except, this week, with the Fed, the politicians, and, at all times, talk radio sports announcers.)

Off to the homestead. Stay warm.

BCOT