The Adventures of Ana Log, Massage Therapist
My alter ego in my massage therapist career has been “Ana Log.” She is a heroine of old school practices that simplify life instead of clouding it.
Contrary to trends out there in e-land, Ana Log has her own schedule book, written in 
pencil, to give her the flexibility a good therapist needs. She doesn’t want to do 10 hours of massage in one day, then two the next. Her antique paper day planner keeps all of her appointments, client names and phone numbers and daily/weekly/monthly trends in check. To look something up, she turns a page. She even takes lunch a few times a week.
Ana Log also keeps her muse, a clock with a second hand, in her therapy room. Ana can count stretches, trigger point treatments and coordinate breath-work without being too obvious about it. The clock makes just enough noise to be able to tune into the seconds count when turned away from it.
Ana’s brother, whose alter ego is “Mr. IT Excel,” loves to point out that all of these things can be programmed in to a good scheduling software and “make life easier.” All of Ana’s preferences can be handled by her automated device of choice, “making her life easier.”
“P-shaw” says Ana, with the vigor of a 19th century ink-stained author. That would involve learning how those programs work and then applying it. And what happens if the cloud is clouded? Or the device is dropped? Or the charger is at home? And what about sunspots?
Mr. IT Excel, whose life involves countless hours of making things easier by adding things to programs, and then even more hours of making those changes actually work as promised, then extracting viruses that try to wreck those programs and then changing the “shaky” platforms those devices dislike (etc., etc., etc.) insists that devices do “make life easier.”
Says Ana Log: “Remember when Dad said if he wanted to talk to someone he didn’t need a computer to do it? He would just pick up a phone or go see the guy?”
