Hard times in Alcohol County.

The seductive new technology of editorial writing has a few glitches.

"O brave new world that has such people in it." - William Shakespeare.

Tell me about it, Bill.

Don't get me wrong. I also admire "such people" who move so easily and so quickly about this "brave new world" we have fashioned out of microchips and silicon. Heck, I don't even resent it that most of them are considerably younger than I. It's just that those of us who started in the business when a keyboard was the lower half of a typewriter are still playing catch-up.

And listen, I love our new computer system. Compared to the old ATEX mainframe, this new Mac-based DTI system is a marvel of speed, efficiency, and versatility. Not only can I write my columns and editorials on my new Mac, but I can also access the Internet, e-mail and fax, and do all the other marvelous things we professionals are assumed to do as a matter of course.

And there's the rub, as Bill Bard would say.

In this brave new world, we surviving cybernauts are expected to work more quickly, more efficiently, and more productively than ever. And because computerization means downsizing, fewer of us have to be quicker, more efficient, and more productive. We've lost our back-up, in other words.

It was our super-fast, super-efficient spell-check system that first got me thinking about the perils of working without a net in this brave new world.

Our old ATEX was designed specifically for newspapers. The people who built it knew that journalists tended to be lazy and were always looking for shortcuts. When ATEX spotted something it didn't recognize, it highlighted the offending word and expected the writer or editor to drag out a dictionary, look up the proper spelling, and make the correction. It forced us to learn and become better spellers along the way.

But this new system is fast, fast, fast, easy, easy, easy, and convenient, convenient, convenient. . . . to the point of being seductive, seductive, seductive.

When it fails to recognize a word, it not only supplies a list of suggested substitutes, but also makes it easy to do the switch. But when you are zipping through editorial after editorial, column after column, letter after letter, analysis after analysis, it's too easy - seductively so - to accidently hit "replace" (or even worse, "replace all") when you meant to hit "keep." Or vice versa. That's how half a dozen references to "Alachua County" turned into "Alcohol County" in my editorial one day.

But how to explain the fact that our computer's spell-check thinks Pensacola the city is really "Pan-sexual"? I'm not even sure what a pansexual is. (I could look it up in the dictionary, of course, but we don't have to do that anymore with spell-check.)

And then there's the scanner from Hell . . . the one that replaced the real live human being who used to hand-type letters to the editor into our system.

I get cold sweats at night worrying that, one day, I'm going to miss one of the little practical jokes that our scanner occasionally slips into our letters. Like the time the woman wrote to brag that her child had been "accepted" into the gifted program at her school. Only the scanner decided the kid had been "accosted" in the gifted program. (Try explaining that to the legal department.)

Or the letter that bragged about President Clinton putting "100,000 new police officers" on the streets. That can't be right, the scanner mused, and then deduced that the writer really meant "100,000 Jew police officers." (The writer didn't.)

And why does our scanner so easily confuse "where" and "whore"? Those are different words entirely. Back in the "good old days," if such potentially embarrassing typos somehow were to make it past the typist, editor, and layout person, we always had the paste-up/proofreader playing backstop. But pagination sent most of them off to journalism's version of the elephant's graveyard.

Meanwhile, those of us who remain in this brave new world are walking as carefully - albeit as quickly, efficiently, and productively - as we dare on this new, computer-assisted editing tightrope. Working up there without a net. Clicking and scanning and checking.

Why, it's enough to drive an old newspaper guy straight to Alcohol County.

NCEW member Ron Cunningham is editorial page editor of The Gainesville Sun in Florida.