Judging by my caller ID, the “Do Not Call” list is about as effective as a condom made out of cheesecloth.

Fifty years ago the New York Worlds Fair touted all the new technology — computers, lasers, picture phones — all displayed in the dizzying and awe-inspiring Carousel of Progress.  Soon, they promised, we would live a life of leisure thanks to labor-saving devices so we could shop from home and watch life go by on huge color TV’s.  Work would be a pastime because robots and machines would do the mundane chores and our office would be a dreamworld of paperless interchange.

How’d that work out?

The average cubicle farm, it seems, is where the 40-hour workweek went to die. According to a new survey, a staggering number of American professionals have workweeks that exceed 40 hours.

Virtual meetings software company PGi conducted an online survey of its customers that yielded more than 600 responses. Of those, 88 percent said they work more than 40 hours a week. Roughly a third each said they work between 41 and 45 hours, or between 46 and 50 hours.

Just over one in five said they work more than 50 hours a week. A main culprit in the lengthening of the workweek is technology that lets people work anywhere.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the “always on” atmosphere that’s permeated across our culture,” said PGi executive vice president of strategy and communications Sean O’Brien.

Now we have smartphones and laptops and Bluetooth.  The boss can always reach you; the files are never more than a click away, and even those of us who cherish time away and make an effort to get out of the office at the end of the day can still get a phone call in the middle of a beach in the Keys that begins with “I hate to bother you, but where’s the spreadsheet for the budget…?”

As Erik Loomis at LGM notes, “The 40-hour week becomes a joke, both because many people cannot work at all or can only find part-time work while those who do have work have to labor well past 40 hours because the boss can track them.”

And yes, we can now shop at home and watch stuff on huge color TV’s.  Of course the biggest market for that is porn.  (Or so I’m told.)

In the digital world, time moves at such a pace that something ten years old is antique.  Twitter is inviting its members to discover their first tweet.

Well, since I am always the last to join something trendy, my account was started less than a year ago.  And here is my first tweet:

How very clever.

We got a spam fax at the office.  It was disguised to look like someone had pasted a newspaper article onto a piece of paper and then hand-written “Thought this was interesting! – A” on it.  It was selling cheap insurance or something.

Two questions:  1) Who falls for that kind of scam, and 2) who uses a fax machine any more?

We still have one because we need something to hold down the top of a spare desk, but I can’t remember the last time I got real fax message.

In which the Bush administration NSA chief Michael Hayden lives in his own Twitter bubble on the Acela train.

We’ve all been there, right? Well, not with a guy doing a “deep background” interview at the top of his lungs on a commuter train.  Usually it’s someone gossiping — “He said WHAT?!?” — on the plane or bus as if they were all alone.

I now have a Twitter account.  It is @BobbyBBWW.

I don’t promise I’ll be tweeting every minute of the day, and I won’t be filling you in on everything I do, eat, see, or hear.  For one thing, I can’t twitter from the office, which is where I spend most of my time.  Second, I can’t imagine anyone would actually give a rat’s ass about what I do, eat, see, or hear.

But anyway, I’m on it.  Yip yah.

I was at FedEx Kinko’s this afternoon getting some copies made. While I was waiting I saw a college-aged kid trying to send a fax. He was completely flummoxed. First, he wasn’t sure how to feed the paper into the tray. Then he kept getting a message through the little speaker, but he couldn’t figure out what it meant by “you must first dial a one.” It turns out the number he was calling was in Fort Lauderdale, which is long distance, and on a land-line you need to dial 1-954-XXX-XXXX. When we finally got that cleared up, the fax machine on the other end kept squawking but not picking up. “Maybe it takes longer because it’s so far away,” he said with complete earnestness. After a couple of more tries, I told him that the fax machine on the other end wasn’t turned on, which seemed to amaze him.

By that time, my copies were done and I had to leave, so I’ll never know if he got through.

Add the fax machine to the list that includes the tape recorder, the phonograph, the rotary telephone*, the VCR, and the mimeograph that are now ancient technology.

*When I moved into my apartment in Miami in 2001, one of the moving men asked if he could use my phone to order a pizza. I said sure and pointed him to the one in the kitchen: a black 1959 wall phone. He stared at the dial for a moment before I showed him how to use it.

This little snippet of nuke news is disturbing.

The United States could only account for 1,160 out of 17,500 kilograms of Highly-Enriched Uranium (HEU) — weapon-usable nuclear material — exported to 27 countries in response to a 1992 congressional mandate, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last week. […]

In another disquieting revelation, the GAO pointed out that in the 55 visits from 1994 through 2010, U.S. teams found that countries who received nuclear components met international security guidelines only about 50 percent of the time.

Yikes.

The New York Times wonders…

Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?

And does that make that comedian, Jon Stewart — despite all his protestations that what he does has nothing to do with journalism — the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow?

It’s interesting that since Mr. Stewart is not alone in being a media personality with an agenda — vide Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh — it was Mr. Stewart who was able to at least make some headway with getting the 9/11 First Responders bill passed, as opposed to the others who carried on against the other bills that got passed such as healthcare, the stimulus, Wall Street reform, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and a lot of other causes.

Mr. Stewart would be the last person to compare himself to the man who helped bring an end to the reign of Joseph McCarthy. Comedians and journalists have roles in our society and they’re not supposed to step over the line. Comics can mock us, but they can’t take up a cause. Journalists can report, but they must be objective. Granted, Mr. Murrow had a lot more to lose than Mr. Stewart; supporting the 9/11 bill and shaming the people who were holding it up was not a controversial stand as opposed to coming out against a demagogue at the height of his power in 1954. But the one thing both men have in common is that they took up a cause on behalf of the weak against the powerful. That is essentially the role of both comedy and investigative journalism: to make us aware of the injustices and exploitations of the powerful.

Edward R. Murrow once said that television can illuminate and educate, but unless the people watching it are willing to learn from what they see, it is merely “wires and lights in a box.” And in his own way, Jon Stewart is saying the same thing.