Bracing for the next tech cycle | MARK LANE

This column began appearing in The News-Journal regularly in the fall of 1999. It's a generation Z column.

Its first iterations were typed on an IBM PC running Windows 95 using the word processor WordPerfect 5.1. This was the premier word processor of the 1980s. Unfortunately, I was using it in the 1990s. My words appeared as white, jagged letters on a blue screen -- a big step up from our even more jagged letters on the amber screen I used to use. It could even do spellcheck if I had a little extra time to run it.

Even those ancient days of computing, this was the eighth word processor I had learned to use. (Included in the list was Bank Street Writer, and yes, I know it was designed for use by children but it worked on low-powered computers.) More word processors followed soon enough. This column originated in the fifth version of Microsoft Word I've used.

And now The News-Journal is in the process of switching some of our software once again. The learning cycle is going into a new rotation.

The software learning cycle works like this: (1) You flail around and ditch all written instructions as unreadable; (2) then figure out how to do only the most basic demands of the job; (3) then acquire next-level skills through a mix of oral lore, watching others, and lucky accidents, until you (4) achieve mastery. Then (5) you put all that knowledge out of your mind because the new software is different.

I am steeling myself for the jump from Step 4 into Steps 5 and 1 again. The early cycle always is humbling because it means abandoning hard-won mastery over the old stuff. That's not a good feeling, the moment before jumping into the bracing waters of the new.

Over the course of a career, a repeated learning cycle leaves one with a lot of complex skills that have zero usefulness in our present culture.

Nobody in the newsroom appreciates that through great application I became adept at loading bulk black-and-white photographic film (Kodak Tri-X) into 20-exposure reusable canisters. That I learned to swiftly set up an acoustic coupler to payphones to transmit stories (taking care to reset the computer to xmodem protocol and to listen for a healthy carrier tone before hitting "send.") That I developed the knack for loading reams of paper with sprocket holes into the tractor feed of our hallway printer. That I could change a type wheel on a phototypesetter, switch out the ribbon on an IBM Selectric typewriter without everything unraveling, or edit an autoexec.bat file to remove unneeded DOS commands.

All valuable skills at one time.

One of my predecessors on this page, the late columnist Bob Desiderio, used to recall the university journalism professor who urged him to learn to work a Linotype machine so he’d never need to worry about being out of a job. Yeah, bad advice. Desi worked at The News-Journal until 2005. The newspaper ditched Linotype in 1967.

Moral: Kids, don't let people talk you into spending a lot of time learning practical skills in college. You never know when the expertise that your elders approvingly call "practical skills" will turn into the sort of thing Civil War reenactors do while tourists take cellphone videos. Take it from a person who sat through a Fortran programming course.

So now I'm wheeling through the next software cycle and learning new practical skills, secure in the knowledge this will all be superseded soon enough.

Still, it promises to be a better way to bring these words to you, even if my typing will remain uncertain and improvement on this side of the keyboard continues to be unlikely.