The Downside of High Technology.

Computers are the ubiquitous, silent servants of the modern office. I should know; I've spent years "teaching" silicon chips to do routine work so that employees can be free to be creative. With people and computers working in tandem, the office is a more productive place, right? Well, sometimes. The world of computers has good fairies, but there are gremlins as well. To avoid falling into technology traps, examine the four most common misconceptions regarding computers in the workplace:

1. PEOPLE CAN REALLY FOCUS ON COMPUTER WORK. Not really. Rather, people can really focus on computers, not necessarily on computer work. A peek at some workers' screens can be revealing. The hands you see hammering the keyboard may not be nailing down a project. They may be pounding out a code so that their spaceship can dodge asteroids.

The hand deftly guiding a mouse may not be working on a pie chart. Computer users even have a euphemism for on-the-clock game-playing: "mouse practice." Many computer games come equipped with a "boss screen," an innocuous graph or summary sheet that pops up with the touch of a key to placate probing eyes. For many computer game players, the escape key means just that.

Computer solitaire has resurrected a game that might otherwise have gone the way of the stick and hoop. Last year, my company hired a temp to handle some telemarketing for us. Whenever I looked in, the phone was glued to his ear. I had high hopes. But his results were poor. This confused me until his co-workers explained to me that while the phone had been riveted to his ear, his attention had been riveted on computer solitaire. Based on a recent survey of 6,000 computers users, American business loses about $100 billion a year because of PC gaming.

2. ELECTRONIC MAIL MAKES IT EASIER FOR PEOPLE IN THE OFFICE TO STAY IN TOUCH. Unfortunately, sometimes you don't want to hear from some of the people. Self-important memo writers or idle scribblers can clutter your E-mail with debris. E-mail improves communication only if the people who receive it are the people who need to receive it. Otherwise, E-mail provokes a babble of opinions. A client of mine recently returned to his office from an out-of-town conference. Several hundred E-mail messages were waiting for him. He spent 10 hours learning, among other things, which team was favored on Monday Night Football or how to make a superb apple cobbler.

3. COMPUTERS CAN STORE A TON OF INFORMATION. Yes, and your attic can store a ton of junk You can squirrel away item after item in your computer memory. The problem is, will you ever be able to find it again? Try to find an old tennis racket among the miscellaneous boxes in your attic.

I once created a file for all my odds and ends called MYSTUFF. Can you imagine how much of my stuff there was after six months? I had given a name to a jungle and called it order.

Further, even the most capacious attic can be overloaded. It's the same with computer memories. The more they store, the more difficulty they have in storing. A computer has only so much brainpower to use for remembering and it has less for thinking (running your software).

4. COMPUTERS MAKE PEOPLE CREATIVE. Not so. Computers are servants. They don't teach creativity, although they do make it easier for some people to enhance their creative ideas. A graphics program, for example, can draw objects with perfect symmetry and allow you to revise your work easily.

But computers also make non-creative, wasteful doodling more fun than ever. There are drawings beyond the dreams of madness--intellectual graffiti--scrawled into the image files of many aa computer.

Furthermore, computers can tempt even the uninspired into fits of "creation." A good example is the ability to format. Add to this the ability to change colors, and you can suffer seasickness as you try to read your E-mail. A friend recently showed me a message that contained five different print colors and eight or nine different fonts. The message, believe it or not, was two lines long. A few words of advice: * Purge game applications. There's no nice way of saying it: Work time is for work. Having a card table and video arcade beckoning from a few feet away makes work seem like a world of dreariness.

* Tell your people that you don't want bulletin board E-mail sent to all and sundry.

* Clean out the attic from time to time. You can do so by throwing obvious junk out. Delete it and purge it.

* Make sure the people in your office have the software they need to do their jobs, but beware of letting everyone have everything. Aspiring artists who weren't hired to do graphic art stay out of harm's way more easily if they don't have an alluring graphic art program. Follow these rules and you'll cut down on workplace distractions. And how many distractions can you find in the silicon-chip wonderland? You'd need a computer to figure it out.