I thought about it a while. Then it hit me that Charlie's company probably had what I needed. Charlie was always an avant-garde fellow and it was his style to have something a bit different, a bit advanced. He was an early adopter.

I found Charlie's number and telephoned. I wasn't surprised to bump into voice mail. Everybody has voice mail, and Charlie was probably one of the first to adopt it.

There was the usual menu. Well, not all that usual. This was a huge menu, an exhaustive menu. Each item had a subset. And subsets had subsets. If you wanted Accounting, for example, you bunged 4. Then you'd have a menu choice of Receivables (Press 1) and Payables (Press 2). If you chose Payables- well, you get the idea.

Lots of people would have hung up, but I got caught up in the spirit of the thing. I even tried my old trick of pressing 0, which often lets you do an end run around the menu to a human operator. No luck.

Charlie was big on technology. I'm sure he would have seen it as a great achievement if he could have done away with a switchboard human altogether.

Then it occurred to me that Charlie didn't want customers to fool around with the telephone, a prehistoric technology. He had to have a Web site.

Or course he did. And it was wonderful. It was one of the most beautiful I'd ever encountered. Though it took forever to download, the home page had a magnificent array of beautiful colors and lovely design elements. Charlie's logo, occupying much of the page and many of the colors in the visible spectrum, was probably created by an award-winning graphics designer.

When I got to the product listings, they were unlike any I'd ever seen. Each product was in a distinctive typeface and color, sitting snugly in a background of a mottled version of a close neighbor in the color spectrum. Charlie didn't believe in sharp contrasts. They were crass.

It was beautiful. But I couldn't read anything. It's probably my fault. The site may have been aimed at customers with younger eyes.

I'll try to find the product I need elsewhere. But I won't forget Charlie's beautiful Web site. That guy really knows how to use technology.