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November 3, 2000

“If there is a chance that something can go wrong, it will go wrong.”
                                                                                   -Murphy’s Law

I’m sure everyone’s been in this situation: it’s 10pm and you have a big project due tomorrow morning. You’ve slaved hundreds of hours making sure the project is as perfect as possible. Now, finally, you’re placing the finishing touches on the file and you go to print. Suddenly the computer freezes and an error message comes up on screen.

Well, you don’t panic. You simply reset the computer and reopen the file, only to find that it’s been completely corrupted. Still, you keep your head, because you had the presence of mind to back up your file on diskette. You reach into your bag and slip the diskette into the computer and attempt to load the backup copy, only to find the diskette completely empty! The file must have not saved properly!

My friend, you have fallen victim to the evils of computers.

Now, this is hardly news. Everyone – and I do mean everyone - knows not to trust a computer. If the paper is due tomorrow, the file will corrupt, or the printer will jam, or you won’t be able to send the file over e-mail to a group member because it’s too big, or your e-mail server will be down, or the printer will run out of ink, or all of the above. Spell checks will miss vitally important and embarrassing mistakes (click here to read my rant on the evils of spell checkers). You will inevitably run out of memory or disk space at crucial moments. Your ISP’s servers will be down the night before important Internet research is due. You won’t be able to log on. You’ll lose a password. Any and all of the above have happened dozens of times to everyone reading this, I can virtually guarantee it. And then there’s the famous "this program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" dialog box. Anyone else want to find the person who invented it and execute him?

Now, granted, many of these problems are, if not exclusive, at least more common with PCs running Windows. I suppose we could all switch to the Mac or to Unix and avoid a good deal of headaches and heart problems. The problem is that the majority of the business world and the world in general is running Windows, and thanks to the need for being compatible, most of us are stuck with it. My computer, for example, usually crashes and needs to be rebooted at least 2 or 3 times a day, and our other computer is even worse.

Everyone knows not to trust the computer. And if you don't know it, it's time you learned. The tolerance for computer-related problems is lessening in the school environment and in the workplace. Bosses and professors who used to accept the "my computer crashed" or the "my printer broke" excuse are no longer doing so. People who leave things until the last minute are usually having some rude awakenings. So if we know about all these problems, what's the big deal? We just have to live with them, right? Well, the way I see it, the key issue is efficiency. I'll explain:

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, work was done by hand or on typewriters. When home computers first appeared on the scene, their purpose was to make life easier and get things done faster. The thing is, have they really accomplished that objective?

Now, I'm not talking about using computers to carry out complex scientific calculations. No doubt they've advanced many fields and our collective level of progress would be considerably less without them. What I’m talking about is using a home computer to do a project, report, or paper, whether for work or for school.

Have they really saved any time? Well if we stopped to think about it, we’d realize that the answer is likely no. Sure, it might take an extra few minutes to type up a final version of a paper on typewriter after correcting by hand. But compare that to the countless hours we spend fixing, debugging, troubleshooting, and yelling at computers, and the answer is clear. In all likelihood we were ahead on time before.

Office environments are particularly bad, especially for small non-computer-related companies without internal IT departments. Instead of actually doing their work, people have to spend days on end upgrading their computers, fixing them, setting them up, and computerizing work processes. I remember working at my Dad’s office a few summers, getting paid to upgrade computers to Windows 95 and to help computerize the bookkeeping system. Not only did they have to pay me to do these things, but the busy people working at the office had to take time out of their schedules to do computer-related tasks as well. It sure doesn’t sound like a time-saver!

Closer to home, I recently had to deal with every computer-user’s worst nightmare: a virus. So here I was on the night before a midterm, when I should have been cramming, but instead I had to spend hours trying to disinfect my system. Incidentally, I got rid of the symptoms but not the cause, so if you’re a computer expert out there who has any advice for me, please feel free to e-mail me. For the time being I don’t have a Notepad file because my computer keeps infecting it each time I install a clean copy.

Computers are evil. I think it’s obvious. So what should we do? Now, I could advocate some drastic measures here, like taking a sledgehammer and disposing of all personal computers the same way that they beat up the fax machine in the movie Office Space. But I’m not ready to concede that society would be better off regressing just yet. I think that computers are wonderful, if imperfect, tools. But they’re only that: tools. I remember my Dad telling me repeatedly that "computers aren’t stupid; the people using them are". Computers are machines; they don’t have brains. They can’t possibly be smart or stupid. So computers are blameless. They’re only as good or as bad as we make them.

You may laugh, but I don’t even remember ever not owning a computer. I’m from that generation that grew up with them. We had our first home computer when I was about a year old. So when I speak of the pre-computer era I’m going on hearsay. I personally can’t imagine having to edit a 25-page paper, let alone actually writing it out, longhand. My hand hurts just thinking about it! No, computers are great- assuming they work, that is.

However, I’m contemplating a lawsuit against Bill Gates for undue amounts of stress. Anyone care to join me? We could make it class-action. No? Not interested? Well, okay, have it your way, but the next time you scream at your computer and all you end up with is a sore throat, feel free to reconsider.