Modern times and renovation

For a good chunk of Wednesday, there was no e-mail at 301 Broadway, home of the Southeast Missourian Newspaper and Renovation Co.

As most of you know, the 80-year-old Missourian building, recently named to the National Register of Historic Places, is undergoing a total revamping from top to bottom, inside and out. The parts that have been completed are spectacular. And the banging and drilling and sawing and scraping are going full blast on areas yet to be finished.

It would have been easy to blame Wednesday's e-mail interruption on construction crews. We've patiently endured closed restrooms, minor glitches in telephone service and electrical blackouts, all in the name of progress.

But, it turns out, the e-mail faltered this week because of -- you guessed it -- a computer glitch.

As a rule, if you can't blame a problem on construction crews, it's always good to know you have a fallback culprit: computers.

What the e-mail breakdown demonstrated, for the most part, is how dependent we are on electronic messaging. For something that didn't exist in most businesses just a few years ago, we now rely on e-mail in just about every phase of our operations. We get news and advertising by e-mail. We get letters to the editor and Speak Out comments by e-mail. We communicate with one another by e-mail. We exchange important directives and instructions by e-mail.

So, without e-mail, we are left to our own rusty devices to carry on.

We have to talk to each other, either in person or by phone.

We have to handwrite notes and walk from here to there to deliver them.

We have to shout -- and it's impressive how wide a range a good shout has in a building that's big on thick concrete and high ceilings.

The e-mail system has been restored. The spam has been deleted. Delayed responses to important questions have been electronically transmitted.

All is right, once again, with the modern world.

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One of the renovation projects here at the Missourian is a new passenger elevator to replace the freight elevator.

As it turns out, the pit at the bottom of the existing elevator shaft was too shallow for the new elevator, so workers broke through the concrete at the bottom of the shaft to find solid bedrock.

This week those workers have been jackhammering a rather sizable hole in the bedrock, much to the dismay of all who fear the dentist's chair and to the delight of all who prefer the syncopation of a jackhammer to the bland strains of canned music that have permeated certain areas of the building.

In addition to the jackhammer symphony -- the first, middle and last movements all have strangely similar overtones -- some of us have noticed another special, but unintended, benefit. For those of us within, say, 25 feet of the elevator shaft, our chairs now vibrate.

Most folks would have to pay extra for that. Here it's just another perk.

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Finally, I can't pass up an opportunity to tell you how fascinated the men who work at the Missourian have been regarding the automated equipment installed in the new upstairs restroom.

Let me just say that I am a big advocate of automation. But as a graduate of the Little House Out Back School of Toiletry, I am convinced that certain things should not be automatic.

Yes to e-mail. No to piped-in office music. Automated toilets? Proceed with caution.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.