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fast. I had a meeting in two days, and I wanted to be able to read it
up beforehand. The trouble was that the writer of the report was in Devon
and I was in Northampton.

I phoned.

‘Problem,’ he said. ‘I’ve only got a slow printer. I won’t be able to
print it out in time for the post. How about if I save it on diskette?’

I quizzed him carefully. Was his computer an IBM-compatible? Yes. Was
his word-processing package the same as mine? No – but he could save the
text as an ASCII file, which my package would still be able to read, albeit
with the page formats scrambled.

The diskette duly dropped into my in-tray, and I slipped it into the
disk drive.

The computer didn’t want to know.

We took it down to a friendly local college whose computer department
possessed all the diagnostics kit that we didn’t, and finally discovered
that the diskette (double density) had been formatted as if for high density.
The computer on which the report was written didn’t mind that, but ours
did.

There are more pitfalls to digital communication than the enthusiasts
would have us believe. Once you start getting multilingual, then the difficulties
really multiply. My sister complains that the beautiful new hardware ordered
for her Languages Department has so far been less than totally successful.
‘Apparently,’ she wrote to me, ‘no one else has ever wanted Hebrew and Arabic
on the same machine . . . ‘

Another much-vaunted gadget, the fax, is an undoubted improvement in
the communication business. It’s particularly good for technical subjects,
because you can transmit a sketch of the thing you’re trying to describe,
and because it isn’t necessary to put technical language through the scrambling
device of a typing pool.

But the fax is not without its drawbacks; there’s the frustration of
receiving from the machine the message that one of your pages has failed
to transmit correctly – but you have no way of knowing which. You have either
to send the whole blessed thing again, or wait for the recipient of your
missive to complain. There’s the inexorable fading of faxed documents with
time – photocopied backups are vital for anything which needs to be permanent.
And, of course, there’s the infamous junk fax, tying up your line and wasting
your paper.

The older forms of communication aren’t without their problems either;
and the longer the distance the bigger the problem. The telex isn’t too
bad once you’ve learnt to translate telexese; ‘TX YR TLX 8-1-90. WILL DHL
BLADING N INVOICES 2 U’ makes perfect sense once you’ve got the hang of
it. But technical terms tend to confuse telex typists, resulting in such
gems as ‘flutucating loads’ and ‘spleroidal graflite’.

The telephone at least gives you a more direct contact, and for short
calls it’s excellent. But as the distances increase, you run up against
time zones; by making a call first thing in the morning I can get our Thailand
office just in time before they knock off for the night. But if I need to
consult, say, the office in California – where they won’t be starting until
I’m off home – before reaching a conclusion, the negotiations could stretch
on for days. Then, despite the continuing advance of technology, you sometimes
find yourself disconcertingly addressing an echo of your own voice with
a time-lag of a couple of seconds. Even worse, different countries have
an assortment of spanners to toss into the works; you can’t get Muslim Senegal
because it’s Friday, Kenya has a bank holiday, the person you’re trying
to contact in Brussels is still stuck in the appalling traffic, and as for
Ethiopia – has anyone heard anything from Ethiopia? Are they still there?
Have the rebels cut the lines or what? All in all, optimistic talk about
the ‘global village’ seems premature. I’m still eagerly awaiting the much-hyped
electronic mail to reach my circle of operation so that I can have a straight
computer-to-computer chat with offices from Brasilia to Brisbane. For the
time being, the most efficient data transfer network seems still to be the
old-fashioned grapevine.

Sue Birchmore is a technical writer living in Birmingham.