It's just a pain
APPLYING this to his own working week, Stephen Roach finds that it includes six hours attributable to the dead weight of the information age (computer boot-up and shutdown: one hour) and more time attributable to the dead weight of his equip- ment. He carries his laptop everywhere he goes, and its spare batteries and adaptors and his cellphone and his palm pilot (what- ever that is) and even some pre-electronic papers. Now he has tendonitis in his elbow and pain in his lower back, and I am not surprised. The Roach tendons, like the cerebellum, are a product of the old tech- nology. They need time-consuming physio- therapy and exercise to keep them going. This, as he says, is not productivity, let alone a magical new paradigm. It's just a pain in the lower back. There's a lot of it about.
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