The pace of change can be frightening and it was with some trepidation that a colleague went off to the "Information Age" town of Ennis for the SIPTU conference this week. His fears of the great Orwellian future were not allayed by the large poster overlooking the O'Connell monument declaring: "Ennis and Telecom Eireann - Together we can connect people with Information."
Worse was to come. He discovered that the press room had a dedicated ISDN line and that large numbers of delegates, instead of rushing to the bar at the end of conference sessions, were queueing up to surf the Net on the union's own bank of computers.
But things were reassuringly familiar after that. The ISDN link in the press centre didn't work, neither did that for the SIPTU computer bank. Both journalists and members had to fall back on (comparatively) old fashioned modems. The phone lines also closed down in a reassuringly erratic way and yes, for every call on his mobile, our man in Ennis found there were at least four messages from people who couldn't get through. Back in Dublin he paraphrased George Bernard Shaw: "I've seen the future, and it doesn't work."