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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, October 4,2006 Half the jobs I've held in my life don't exist anymore. When I was a kid I spent a few summers 'stooking' hay on my brother-in-law's farm. It meant trudging through a field, pitchforking sheaves of new- mown hay into teepee-like stacks to dry in the sun. Nowadays, farmers use big, smelly combine-balers which vacuum the hay up from' the field, bind it in tight, snug bales and spit it out in a tenth of the time. I also worked, years ago, as a plumber's gofer, humping heavy cast-iron pipe from truck to jobsite. That job's gone. Cast-iron pipe is history, replaced by light-weight plastic. plastic. And do ocean-going vessels vessels even employ lookouts anymore? As a deck cadet on an oil tanker back in the '60's,. I spent many a lonely four- hour stint on late-night 'watch' - standing on the bridge peering peering with red-rimmed eyes out into the darkness, looking for lights - or the hulk of anything adrift that might do us harm. Basic Black by Arthur Black From your roving Robo reporter Radar takes care of that chore nowadays. I'm not complaining. Those were jobs best left to mechanical devices with nothing nothing better to do. Still, it's humbling humbling to realize that you can be replaced by an assemblage of nuts and bolts hooked up to an engine. Remember the folk song about that nineteenth century "steel-drivin"' man, John Henry? He was, so legend legend has it, the strongest, fastest man ever to swing a sledge hammer. One fateful day he faced off against a steam-engine spike driver to see whether man or machine was better at laying railroad track. John Henry won--sort of. Died with a hammer in his hand, poor boy Died with a hammer in his hand Ah, well. It wasn't too much' later in my life that I laid down my pitchforks and binoculars in favour of a typewriter typewriter and became a Newspaper Newspaper Guy. After all, it would be rainy day in Osoyoos before any machine could replace a reporter, right? Not right. Thomson Financial, an American news service that supplies market info to newspapers, newspapers, television and radio stations across North America, has just introduced its latest crack team of news writing staff members. It's a bank of computers. The machines have been programmed to intercept, interpret, write and transmit automated articles on stock market news. They can scan developments on, say, a corporation's corporation's earnings report, interpret the data with reference reference to current conditions and previous history--and publish an actual news story on the event within 0.3 seconds. , A Thomson spokesman said it's not about replacing reporters. It's "about delivering delivering information to customers so they can make an immediate immediate trading decision." Sure. That's what the railway railway barons told John Henry. Come to think of it, I once knew the newspaper equivalent equivalent of John Henry. His name was Jiggs O'Brian, one of my early mentors in journalism. Jiggs was riding a copy desk at a struggling bi-weekly newspaper when I met him, winding up a downwardly- spiraling forty-year career. Jiggs had seen it all and written written about most of it, big and small, from coronations to long-lost-brother-reunion stories, stories, wedding-ring-in-a-lake- trout stories, and kitten-up-a- tree stories. . Was Jiggs jaded and cynical? cynical? No. Ozzie Os-boume is jaded and cynical. Jiggs was... something else. I remember how he handled fire stories. Most reporters would relish the chance to chase a clanging fire engine and write a first-person I-was-there story. Not Jiggs. He had special special forms he kept in the bottom bottom left hand drawer of his desk, right behind the 26-er of Captain Morgan. When someone someone phoned in a fire report, Jiggs would take one of the forms, roll it into his typewriter typewriter and start pecking in the blanks. The form went something something like: - City firemen were called out to deal with a alarm fire that broke out at _AM/PM yesterday/this morning/afternoon in the district of the North/South/East/West ward. Fire Chief/Deputy Fire Chief/Acting Fire Chief said there were _ casualties. Damage was estimated to be negligible/substantial/about negligible/substantial/about $ . Cause of the fire was faulty wiring/careless • smoking/ lighfning/unknown/suspi- cious. Good old Jiggs -just slightly slightly ahead'of Thomson Financial. Financial. I should have seen it coming, coming, of course. When I started out in the newspaper biz, any reporter worth his byline could write fluent shorthand. Hand-held tape-recorders came along and took care of that. And for at least the past twenty years, my battered Olivetti has been relegated to duty as a spider incubation unit on the back shelf of my closet, replaced by my laptop computer. Gone are the days of carbon copies, and messy, illegible copy paper. 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