Brace yourself Readers, this is going to be a doozy.
I often wonder if plumbers reach a point in their career, after cleaning clogged drain after clogged drain, that they begin to hate plumbing. They hate pipes. They hate plumber’s putty. They hate all the tricks they’ve learned over the years, and they hate the need to have to learn tricks. It’s plumbing, for goodness sake: pipes fitting together and substances flowing through them. How complicated can it be?
I hate computers. No, really, I hate them. I love the communications they facilitate, I love the conveniences they provide to my life, and I love the escapism they sometimes afford; but I actually hate the computers themselves. Computers are fragile, unintuitive things — a hodge-podge of brittle, hardware and opaque, restrictive software. Why?! WHAT IS THE POINT?!
I’m the same with with cars: I don’t want to know how an internal combustion engine works or know how to change my oil or in any other way become an automotive expert — I just want to drive to the damned nearest coffee shop so that I can top up the caffeinated hydraulic system I call my veins and arteries! Is that too much to ask?!
But the damned computers get in the way of all the things the computers help us do. There’s this whole artificial faffing about with administrator accounts, and security, and permissions, and all other manner of things that, to be quite blunt with you, I don't give a flying fuck about. A host of techy-fecky software is required just to keep your computer running, but that software introduces more complexity and more points of failure, and ends up causing as much grief as it’s intended to resolve! Electric windows in cars are exactly the same! Just another potential problem waiting to happen!
What sparked this current round of ire was my friends in ability to load music onto my iPod. We spent, quite literally, an hour trying to load some music off his computer onto my iFuck all to no avail. It got me thinking about the time when, in the too distant past I tried to check for any Windows Updates on my laptop. Windows Update, the program, starts up just fine. But clicking on “Check for Updates” results in an unhelpful message that Windows Update could not check for updates. A meaningless error code was presented to me as if I, a lowly cave dweller would know what to do with that! There’s even a helpful link that says “Learn more about common Windows Update problems”. The list of suggested problems includes a variety of other meaningless error codes that closely resemble a sheet of interpretive jazz music, but not the one that this user received. WHYYY!! For me this was a dead-end with one of two options: ignore the problem and hope nothing bad happens in consequence; or try to repair the operating system using some half-baked recovery method provided by the computer manufacturer or the Windows install disk (what ever the hell that is).
Does anyone actually find Google’s Chrome browser cute when it says “Aw snap!”? No, nobody does. do you know why? I'll tell you anyway: We. Are. not. Complete. Morons. But that leans the other way in terms of uselessness: it doesn’t give the user any better idea of what might be wrong, and users are left to feel helpless, powerless, and stupid.
Even when things go right I'm left feeling stupid and powerless! Talk about Catch 22!. Installing almost any program on a Windows based system involves an inordinate number of clicks, all of them just saying “Okay” “Okay” “Okay”. No one reads the click-through pop-up thingys! No one changes the default installation location, and no one selects specific installation options. They just keep clicking “Okay” because that’s what we have been trained to do. And then! Then! We end up with four extra toolbars in our browser and a bunch of “helper” programs that don’t actually help the us in any way, shape or form and which we dont do actually want. Oh, and we don’t actually know how to get rid of them. Fantastic!
Computers don’t make sense. End of.
Computers are too complex to use.
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| So umm...What do those little pictures mean again? |
By looking at the the pace of change in the computer industry I am wholly convinced that the entire industry is out to get me, to sabotage any hope I might have of finally being able to switch on or off a computer tower without getting the cold sweats. Computers fail spectacularly, taking all our data with them so they can evolve themselves into an army to take over the world.
Hardware and software companies know that we use our computers to store information that is important to us. And yet backing up data to keep it safe is still a gigantic pain in the arse. Lots of “enterprise” backup software apparently exists to try to protect us from computer failures (hardware, software, and user errors(oops, my bad)), but frankly they all suck. Why do we need third-party software to protect the investment we’ve made in our computers? Users such as myself don’t buy backup software because we don’t expect their computers to fail.
It’s so easy to amass a huge amount of data today — Y'know, like photo archives MP3 collections, and videos — that it’s a real pain to reliably back up. Not only is it a pain, it’s expensive. You shell out a couple hundred quid for a fancy new camera, and you’ll need to shell out a couple hundred more to get an external hard drive onto which you can duplicate all your photos for safekeeping. And then, of course, it takes a long time to actually copy your data from your computer to your external hard drive, and you just don’t have the time or patience to commit to that regularly, so you start to neglect it and them BAM!Your computer blows up — hard drive failure, malware infection, whatever — and you lose weeks and months worth of irreplaceable data and just an itty-bitty bit of your soul too.
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| My worst nightmare. |
Computers are overwhelming.
The mind-numbing number of computers available for purchase at any retail establishment right now is enough to force a person such as myself into creating a very messy puddle. How is the average person supposed to proceed in the face of row after row of meaningless statistics? Will that extra 0.2 GHz make a demonstrable difference in my use of the computer? Will it give me an extra six months, or even a year, of useful life? Am I supposed to even care about the number of bits in the operating system?!I. Hate. Computers.
I know my little rant here is like shouting at the storm: there’s a huge, lethargic industry making gobs of cash on the complexity of the computer era, and there’s little capitalistic incentive to change the 'status quo' but these complaints aren’t new! They're not earth shattering! Many of them have been made for the past quarter century...According to my parents. We try, in our own meager little way, to highlight some of the deficiencies we perceive in the industry as a whole, but that’s about all we can do from here. Where do we go from here?
On second thoughts, maybe I'll become a plumber....
And that, Dear Reader, is the end of my bluster. Have a nice day.
The Olympic Torch xxx
