NO: Post-Its are Preferable to Unit’s Crashes and Quirks

At risk of being beaten, stoned and exiled by my fellow tech writers, I’ll tell you a secret: I hate my Palm Pilot with the intensity of 1,000 suns.

In fact, I use the word “my” about this infernal thing only with great reservation. You see, I never wanted a darn Palm Pilot.

My husband insisted on buying it for me after he found himself on the carrying end of my briefcase, which weighed just shy of 43 tons. He promptly concluded that he was ruining his posture not on account of my reportorial necessities, but a combination of my beat-up, wannabe-leather date book; a personal address book with 10 years’ worth of addresses per person and a printout of every work contact I might ever or could ever need.

Now, I consider myself as computer-savvy as the next person who has had a computer at home since the age of 9, but I was plenty happy with my Post-It Note/paper-scrap version of organization. I was bored when friends and family sang the praises of Palm, each hoping to out-Pilot the other. (“My Palm Pilot gives me Fox Trot lessons!” a friend would proclaim. “Well, my Palm Pilot does my laundry!” my 60-something mother would retort.)

What’s more, I railed against the Palm-ification of the English language, in which the word “Pilot” becomes a generic term for diary or personal phone book, much the way “Kleenex” took over reference to facial tissue. Woe to the person who suggests an appointment date by declaring a need to check his “Pilot,” as if confirming that it will be possible to jet into town on that date.

Then, suddenly, a “gift” of a Palm IIIx made me one of the enemy.

I honestly tried to keep an open mind as I familiarized myself with the various workings of my new toy. But that lasted about as long as it took me to figure out that said toy really couldn’t do just about anything I wanted it to.

For instance, my “Pilot” loves nothing more than a good UFA--Unidentified Fixed Appointment. This drives me nuts: I can’t see all my appointments during a given week, just big blocks of time X’d out for reasons unknown until I check each day, one at a cotton-pickin’ time.

While I’m at it, here’s another: Why can’t I divide my phone book in two, one for personal numbers and one for work, and have subdirectories within each of them?

Categories, it gave me. But it mixed up my work and home subsections like a Cuisinart. A full list of numbers put my house painter smack against my contact at Polo Ralph Lauren, whereas the “specific views” category had me scratching my head to figure out whether I had put my sister’s business address under “Family” or “Work,” because the “find” function only worked about every third time.

My Pilot tried to tell me to be grateful that I had gotten that far by forcing me to trick it into organizing the way normal people do, sorting some numbers by company name, some by job title, some by subject and others by name. (It seemed a bit silly to list “Mom” by the name of her law firm, or Sears, Roebuck & Co. by the name of my favorite PR person there.)

Proponents cooed that I needed a few little downloads to appreciate Palm magic. The wonders of the world, they said, would be mine with but a handful of additional $10 to $20 programs--and the ancillary special add-on programs’ $10 to $20 launching system, organizing system and backup system.

So off I went to my computer, to spend more money on this blasted little machine so it would do the things everyone led me to believe it should have done without the upgrades.

I acknowledge being bitter as I searched for the right download to, say, make my Palm date book willing to accept a pasted-in number from my phone list. And I was bitter as I configured, installed, crashed and reconfigured each program three times before realizing it wasn’t the right program in the first place, or was incompatible with the last program I downloaded. (And don’t even ask about the French phrase book that didn’t list any phrases, or for that matter, list nouns’ correct gender--a detail contained, I think, even in an airplane-jacket translation guide.

I’m still hopeful I might one day appreciate this evil time-waster that has me pressing and searching every day after work, into the wee hours of the night (and OK, even a few times at work) detracting from my otherwise productive life. But I probably will still resent it for making me work so hard to add in what some programming wonk should have known to include in the first place.

And before any healing can begin between my Palm and I, it is going to have to stop crashing on me. Pretty please, little friend?