Once, and not so long ago either, I was a reasonably intelligent specimen. I read books at a steady clip. I kept lists of words to increase my vocabulary. I engaged in erudite conversations with my peers, employing jargon-free complex sentences and multi-pronged critical arguments.

Then I bought a computer.

Now I speak in a language incomprehensible to most people and I spend lots of money on obscure objects, like RAM and expansion cards. The computer runs most of the day and the monitor hums like a contented cat; my real cat is jealous of the monitor and sometimes sits on top of it and looks at me with disdain and pity.

I bought my first computer for one reason: to expedite writing. I had succumbed to the notion that word processing would ease the task of writing. This is more a testament to laziness than to efficiency, and thus my personal diminishment began. I can say with surety that the moment I plugged in that old 286, running DOS 4 and WordPerfect 5.1 (the writer's word processor of choice), I transmogrified from a writer into a configurer, a tinkerer, a batch file scribe in search of the most elegant way in which to build layered command lines. Suddenly, I found myself writing macros instead of stories, rewriting the autoexec.bat instead of reading a good book, endlessly reworking the mysterious config.sys file in ever more fruitless quests to load programs into the upper reaches of the system's base memory array. Listen to me. This is how I talk all the time.

That the computer is also a staggeringly incompetent majordomo impinges on one's soul that much more. You give the computer instructions and every so often it simply refuses to follow them, as though it thought it were some kind of Bartleby the Scrivener. Or it stops working altogether. This is considered a nominal condition in the industry. It's a given that your computer will only operate correctly for a certain percentage of the time in which it is put to use. I was unaware of this truism when I bought the 286. I did not know that I needed technical aptitude to solve continuing and growing problems. Actually, in the days before Windows, misconfigurations, lock-ups, freezes, and corrupted files, were relatively rare, as were reinstallations of the operating system. Now, hardly a month goes by in which I don't reinstall Office 97, the best-selling suite of "productivity" software.

My complaint that the computer diminishes us intellectually by its intricacies is only half the charge. The other half is that the computer has also destroyed leisure time, or at the least it has repurposed it, moved it around, and blurred the lines between working and lolling about. The two charges are related. On the one hand, computers distract you from active engagement of intellectual pursuits by offering themselves as tortuous puzzles of options and buttons and configurations. If that doesn't work, if you still manage to get a book in once or twice a year, computers demand from you one hour of maintenance for every three hours of use. Thus the time they save is cancelled by the time required to troubleshoot system problems. But for all this, I can only blame myself for my undiscipline, for letting myself get lost in endless tinkering and upgrading. It's the other way in which computers encroach on us that's more insidious and more dangerous.

Computers generate work. Without computers, companies couldn't run detailed analyses of marketing data from every possible demographic perspective. They wouldn't need to hire data slaves to process the information and to prepare it for another run through the system. In my days as a corporate peon, I saw data pouring out of printers and distributed to department managers. The reports detailed new tasks that the software designed based on continuously incoming statistical data. Some of these tasks were "test runs" to see if the new task configurations were viable. If they were, the tasks became standard. A friend of mine works late into the night, every night, her office one of a few dozen lighting up the windows of the building, casting lonely beacons to the outside world. My friend slaves over her computer, a computer attached to a network that never quiets. Lately, when I watch her eat a meal, her fingers seem to manipulate her fork and knife as if the utensils were actually computer keys.

Computers bring work home. Computers are suited for performing job-related activities away from the job site. This is the most insidious way a computer ruins our lives. There was a time when a nine-to-five job meant that after five, your time was your own. No more. With computers at home, with laptops, and with networks to connect computers to each other, a home, a bus, or a train, easily become secondary work places. Business travelers can work on their commute, or on trips, or at the beach. On days they are sick at home, they can still "check in" with e-mail and work on their monthly status report uploaded by an efficient assistant. When I passed these observations to a colleague, he noted that the blurring of work/leisure time also meant that leisure conversely found a home in the work place. People spend half their day at work surfing the Internet to do their shopping. They write letters, read the news, or monitor their stocks. They play on-line games against people in Brussels. While all this may be true, it is a pale shadow of real leisure. It is a sketchy, furtive, underhanded leisure that is always threatened by exposure.

My computer has ruined my life: it has distracted me, emptied me, made me stupid, stolen the best years of my life, and begs for my attention seven days a week. Why don't I just throw it out? Why can't I stop using it? A friend of mine pointed out that I have very little choice in the matter. The computer revolution has insinuated itself so thoroughly into my life that rejecting it now would be like rejecting the world.