There always seemed to be something deficient in the idea that by the Year 2000, most of us would simply telecommute, working from home at our terminals and hardly anyone would have to go to work, and an item in the Financial Times Observer column unwittingly makes the deficiency clear: it reports that the Lamb & Flag pub in London’s Covent Garden has installed a facsimile machine so that the advertising executives that patronise the place don’t have to break their working lunches and dash back to the office to approve urgently needed ad artwork – making it blindingly obvious that by 2000, the average man will simply mosey down to the pub in the morning, plug his laptop computer-cum-fax into one of the phone points on the bar, and between heated discussions of last night’s match and the new barmaid’s superstructure, languidly key in enough to keep the bosses happy.
