Polyanna Note

Well, here's a pleasant surprise: I signed on to download my audio Economist for this week and found that I can now do it direct and automatic: have it delivered direct to my laptop Ipod file, for transfer to the device itself. This is a lot easier than remembering to sign on each week, and then doing a download, and then transferring to the Ipod file myself: doing it this way, I usually make mistakes, and it usually chews up about a half hour of my life.

Meanwhile it occurs to me that the last few times I've dealt with doctors, I've found they were actually ahead of the curve on insurance paperwork--"paperwork" here meaning computer bits. Ditto prescriptions. Evidently somebody is figuring out that there actually is some virtue in taking some initiative here, and flattening the speedbumps.

And just now I hung up the phone after doing a financial transfer which I could not do on line. Once again, it was quick and painless.

God forbid I turn Polyanna here, but I think I have to face up to the fact that there just might be a trend here. Whatever I say about the evil providers, the fact is that there is a learning curve here and they have share my interest in making transactcions more friction free.

I suppose the only downside on this is that every frontier is a horizon: the more we can do, the more we will want to do, and as we do new tricks, we will run into new problems. The other thing I did last night was to put all sorts of apps onto my Blackberry...