So you have to guess where hell is. For nearly two years, I've been living the paperless office, and I'm here to tell you it almost works. Except for tonight. You see, the paperless office works great whenever you actually have some electronic information to work with. It's not so hot when all you have is a slip of paper, a hallway conversation, or a voice- mail. It's now 12:30 AM in Austin, Texas. I've been traveling for over 9 hours to get to my destination, which up until a moment ago I was hoping against hope was Austin. And thanks to the paperless office, I've been able to determine via the web (not that the modem is connected--couldn't do that on the plane!) that I'm about 90 miles from where I'm supposed to be tonight. Which isn't bad, considering I started out about 1800 miles ago--heck, that's only 5%!!! There are some conferences and speaking engagements I do that are incredibly well organized. This isn't one of them: this is a public welfare agency confab with a bunch of yahoos on per diem. Consequently, there were none of the standard mechanisms for routing me. There wasn't really a conference organizer, there wasn't any email traffic, there were just a couple of poorly organized phone calls and a web site that is hard to navigate. So through a combination of mishaps, my travel agent got the wrong idea and there weren't any checks and balances. This checks and balance thing is fitting, I guess, as I'm giving this speech this morning at a government conference. At 8:30 AM. 90 miles away. And there are no rental car agencies open this late. Except in civilized areas of the country. So I'm writing you this from a shit-kicker bar that has all the shuffleboard you could want to play. So, from this seventh level of hell I'm here to let you know that the paperless office -- and cyberspace in general -- haven't quite arrived as a way of life in the Republic of Texas.