|
ARCHIVES
|
Computer Glitch Posting Date: Oct 14 2007 12:57AM Its inner workings are a mystery of capricious light speed and silicon. It is both a tool of awesome potential and a boat anchor on your forward progress.
It is your computer.
Not long ago – sometime in the 1990’s, I think – my computer ran on methane gas and a hamster wheel. Hard drives were newfangled and floppy disks were the size of a newspaper. A colour monitor was one you had painted blue and greater connectivity meant going with the twelve foot printer cable instead of the standard six footer.
Those were simpler times, times of almost magical optimism for the science and art of computering. There was a visceral thrill in right-justifying a couple of lines of text or wiping crumbs off the little track ball snuggled into the underbelly of your mouse. We used old televisions for monitors and thought that sixty-four kilobytes of memory seemed a little excessive.
Back then, computers were fresh. They were a joy of discovery and possibility. We were all like heavy-petting teenagers in the back seat of dad’s Dodge, poking, prodding and exploring with a lack of skill that only made the mystery more mysterious and the discovery all the more sweet.
But then something happened. Computers became appliances.
There was a time when automobiles and telephones seemed like sorcery. There was a day when refrigeration was for the super-wealthy and a spoken-word radio program made thousands of people believe that aliens had landed in New Jersey, of all places. Now, each of those things is an appliance, robbed of its lively essence, demoted into daily utility along with the remote control garage door, the microwave oven, and the radio-alarm clock (which, lest we forget, was big news as recently as the Eighties).
The interesting thing about this transition of utility is that while we no longer feel the magic of the computer, the computer, paradoxically, has finally become magical. I owned three different computers before I used one for much more than word processing and playing the occasional video game. I used to think that there wasn’t much point in shelling out for a colour screen. I used to think a big hard drive was a waste and that there was no point in getting speakers for my laptop. Of course, I also used to think that Justin Timberlake was a train wreck waiting to happen and Britney Spears was going to be the next Whitney Houston. Then JT inexplicably became a global superstar with a free pass into the pants of every hot starlet in Hollywood, while Britney and Whitney are both one barnyard sex tape away from bussing tables at TGI Friday’s (meaning, of course, that my prediction was at least half accurate in a back-handed sort of way).
Now, I know better. Now I know that it’s time to restore to the computer what it once achieved with ease – its magic. Stop and think for a second about what your computer can do and about what you can do because of your computer. Try not to take for granted the sorcery that puts these words before your eyes. Understand that there is an entire generation growing up now without a bottle of Liquid Paper sitting next to its typewriters. Remember that the beautiful photos you just downloaded or scanned used to have to be cut surgically from the pages of National Geographic and pasted onto page six of your class assignment on volcanoes. Think about the fact that presentations used to be delivered with the aid of transparencies or, heaven forbid, chalk and a telescoping metal pointer. You used to do your taxes by hand, sometimes even doing the math in your head!
Your computer is the magician that made all of these things vanish like the 5 ¼ inch floppy disk and the DOS prompt, so maybe your computer deserves a little love. Take a moment to consider its awesome power, its grand accomplishments and its miraculous potential … and then kick it down the stairs the next time it hangs on you for no reason, killing twenty minutes of work.
F*%!^#g computers. |
