My sister performs surgery. But not the kind of "surgery" that we do here at Computerworld Hong Kong (snipping errant adverbs and tying off leaky metaphors). She"s doing her residency at some hospital in the rural American Midwest -- in a town she refers to as "Cowpie." After another year or so she"ll be free from indentured servitude and able to practice medicine.

I"m proud of my sister and her mastery of surgical tech. Now, a techie she is not. The woman doesn"t know how to rip an MP3, let alone decipher arcane case studies on operating-system TCO or storage-controller interoperability. But when she"s stitching inside someone"s abdomen, she knows which clamp to specify, and what diameter of thread to use. Millimeter-precision is her métier.

Not ours. Our unofficial motto at Computerworld Hong Kong (CWHK) Editorial is: "if it works, use it." Our copy is written on the backs of press releases, XP-driven IBM boxes, cardboard scraps, OS X-powered Mac laptops, and cocktail napkins. Working titles are ripped out by the roots, subheads scrapped and captions truncated.

We"re digging for content. We"ll cheerfully chainsaw icefalls of verbiage to free frozen nuggets of info. As architect Frank Lloyd Wright decreed: "form follows function." Functionality is our mantra, which is why terse oaths ring out amongst our cubicles when word-processors glitch, or corporate Web sites swirl with puffery rather than dishing up the essential metrics or high-resolution staff photos we need.

Because we are working journalists rather than surgeons, a recent comment by fellow journalist Ariel Tam, in an online article from Singapore"s Today publication, rankled. We"re not sure if Ms Tam was entirely serious, but she wrote: "Men, on the other hand, are obsessed with the many functions that a gadget can perform. It doesn"t matter if half of these functions are useless to them...it"s important to have those 101 functions, they insist."

This irked us. The CWHK editorial staff comprises both genders, yet none of us are fussy about PDA bells and whistles.

In fact, none of us even owns a PDA. We type, we need keyboards, not scribblety-jibbet cyber notepads or QWERTY raised-dot angel-finger-sized-keys.

We phone or use SMS text-messaging, so we use mobile phones that don"t jangle grating Cantopop ring tones but do alert us when an SMS comes in. And we need e-mail: preferably the meaty type packed with content, not glistening pink emulsion hyping pathetic monetary scams or bogus medications.

That 3G stuff? Yeah, we tried it out. Some postage-stamp-sized video clips appeared, then the battery ran out. PDAs? I had one about five years back. The connecting cable became obsolete, and the new one didn"t work. Vendor support sent new software, it didn"t work either. The batteries ran down and I sold it to some shop in Mongkok. They tossed me noodle-money.

In the IT world, form follows function, and the scrap heap follows malfunction.

We understand that manufacturers are under pressure to upgrade their products in a never-ending carnival of new features. There are people out there so addicted to gadgetry they"ll buy stuff even THEY admit they"ll never use.

Some of the designs are attractive. But in the trenches, I want to pick my mobile phone off the floor, where I dropped it, confident that it will continue to commit acts of telephony (and SMS, which certainly beats the ol" walkie-talkie I-shout/you-shout ear-mouth-ear tango you see people doing on the MTR).

I don"t need most of the "value-adds," just as I don"t need my word-processor to generate graphs or convert prose to half-baked HTML. Word-processors process words, phones are for phoning and text-messaging, e-mail is for communication and transfer of essential documents. As Robert DeNiro"s character said in The Deer Hunter (while holding up a .30 caliber slug): "You see this? This is this. This ain"t somethin" else."

Certainly there are men who are obsessed with the specs of their tech. Just as there are men whose self-worth seems hogtied to their automobile, or chunky gold watch, or Italian shoes, stamp collection or whatever. Throughout the ages, doubtless ("hey Thag, I"ve got more flint spearheads than you. Ugh.").

Just as there are women who, it seems, can"t get through a conversation without mentioning how much they paid for the latest Louis Vuitton satchel (another overpriced creation that crawled out of the Swamp of Beige-and-Brown), or how many sparkly crystal swans they received as wedding gifts.

Here"s the point: flaunting of objects, and/or the objectification of personal technology, is not gender-specific. Money and fame are hollow. Communication and knowledge are valuable.

Form follows function.