Such of my prose as sees the light of publication about this time every year tends to brocade its sentences, bleed about the heart, and bay at the moon.
I can see it coming, but can't seem to stop it; it affects anything written within about a week of Saint Patrick's Day. This though I'm only a quarter Irish, don't know from what county said quarter came, and have only the most cookie-cutter conception of what it is to be Irish.
My idea of, say, County Cork, for example, is Blarney Castle, stone-fenced farms, ruddy-faced children, and cheery wakes, while in fact County Cork is now Silicon Glen, and Cork itself the site of that model of automation, Apple's European manufacturing plant. Leprechaun-height robots rolling across the stone floors, I fancy, as I sit here typing on one of those same Cork computers.
Well, not really. My Mac II was probably built in California, but it makes a better story if it's a Cork box, that being what is called an Irish fact. Called that at least by Hugh Kenner, whom you more likely know for his book reviews in Byte magazine than for his books about the Irish soul, and he no more Irish than myself.
The Irish soul, Kenner says, or actually it was University of Cork professor John Montague, although Kenner said something similar, is heavy with loss and language, and loss of language. Irish writers changed from Gaelic to English in the 19th century, a language loss that has expressed itself most often in the metaphor of blindness. according to Montague, and I merely mention that the latest studio CD from those Dublin dropouts, U2, features a song called "Love is Blindness."
Citing U2 as emblematic of the Irish soul shows how superficial is my grasp of said soul, as does my mentioning, with a meaningful eyebrow raised at CD-ROM vendors, that said CD is packaged in recyclable and biodegradable cardboard. But U2's medium is vocal, and as Hugh Kenner points out, and it is Kenner this time, all language has its roots in vocalizations. There's surely a Master's thesis in the question of whether computer languages are more popular when their lexicons are pronounceable. Or in the case of Forth, their dyslexicons.
Which, by way of preamble, more or less introduces a story I recently read by a more or less Irish writer on the subjects of automation and that precise and slippery language, the law. San Francisco Examiner reporter Kathleen Sullivan, who was born in Oregon but is more Irish than Kenner and I put together, wrote in the March 15th issue a story that spoke to the Irish in me. Postal workers in the United States, Sullivan reports, are suffering from the automation of the 1960s. The late '60s-vintage letter sorting machines, it seems, are injuring workers right and left, with up to 90 percent of workers in Peoria showing some symptoms of injury from the equipment, and 21.5 percent of San Francisco workers showing clear carpal-tunnel syndrome symptoms. The machines don't meet OSHA standards for key travel distance, the employees are required to produce way more key presses per minute than is regarded safe. The Postal Service has been repeatedly cited by OSHA for willful violations of employee safety standards and has repeatedly failed to comply.
It doesn't have to, you see. As a quasi-governmental agency, the Postal Service is not subject to the fines or shutdowns or legal actions that OSHA would by now have taken against a purely private-sector firm. But the government is, in this case, exempt from the law. That's an American fact.
The Postal Employee Safety and Health Act, expected to be introduced in Congress this month, may solve the problem, but the whole mess underscores the fact that user-interface design is not just an aesthetic issue. It can be a matter of health and safety.
The Irish whose soul Hugh Kenner knows would have known how to deal with the Postal Service. When Ireland's govemment was making the transition to English, although still keeping Irish as the official language, Irish being what Gaelic is called by the Irish, few of whom spoke it even then, many Irish patriots staged demonstrations at theIr post offices, demanding to be served in their native language, notwithstanding they didn't understand it. Afterward, they wrote letters to their local papers about the matter, in impassioned English.
It's a fact.
Michael Swaine editor-at-large
Copyright © 1992, Dr. Dobb's Journal