Heard the one about the bloke who sweated at his laptop all weekend writing an essential, vital, momentous document needed by crack of dawn Monday? He wrote and revised, cut and pasted, underlined and highlighted, formatted and reformatted, spell-checked and grammar-checked, tried three different fonts (opting for Times New Roman), put the headlines in 16 point and 12 point before settling on 14 point, began his paras with bullets, then asterisks, then dropped caps, then decided on indents and in the late, late darkness of Sunday night, when he was utterly exhausted and the document was utterly perfect he pressed a key-or was it two?-and the entire shebang vanished.
That's it. It's not a joke. To the bloke it was a tragedy. At about midnight Sunday he could be seen whirling his mouse across every icon on the screen, jabbing at every key on the board, opening every file he could find, glaring hopelessly at his instruction manual. Mindlessly, obsessively, he visited his trashcan, again and again. With trepidation and guilt he woke his 12 year old-the lad's a genius with Windows 95-then called the office geek, who talked him through several ineffective solutions, and at about 1am desperately telephoned his anorak friend Pete who talked him through some more. It was to no avail. The bloke slumped back, limp, blank, brain dead. The document had spun off to the great filing cabinet in cyberspace. It was never seen again. Give or take a trivial detail, I was that man. Give or take a trivial detail, you probably have been too.
Even the most savvy of computer buffs regularly loses documents, spreadsheets, files, e-mails, irreplaceable data or crucial amendments made to crucial reports. My firm's most omniscient boffin recently lost an entire presentation at King's Cross Station. He had altered a couple of charts while waiting for the train. Don't do that.
Nor do computers just do vanishing tricks. Their screens freeze, refusing to respond either to gentle coaxing or angry thumping. They lie, telling us they cannot do things for reasons we know, or soon discover, to be untrue. They wander off on random walks, bringing back to the screen images we were looking at days ago but have long since lost interest in. They crash and throw away documents as we write them. They take umbrage with the printer. They default to typefaces we do not like and do not want. They indent paragraphs without either our own or Fowler's approval. They refuse to put things in italics and then refuse to drop the italics once they have decided they like them. When they get bored, or tired, they refuse to send or receive e-mails, and then when they do so they transmute them into gobqledxgooz language.
The IT guys naturally refute such anthropomorphism. They insist that 99.99 per cent of all known problems are caused by human error. They say you pressed a few keys in quick succession which together resulted in disaster, or you did not go through the due processes, or you once spilled coffee on the keyboard, or you are electrostatically charged, or you have caught a virus, or you switched off too quickly. Or you are plain clumsy, or ignorant, or stupid. As our head of IT said when consulted about this article: of course computers fail, very, very occasionally. But humans fail all the time.
Nobody denies that humans fail all the time. But the malevolent little microchips should take their share of the blame, too. It's because they don't-and won't-that we suffer computer rage.
Road rage inspires people to bludgeoning violence. Yet nobody takes physical revenge on their computer. IT pros say that people are always threatening to, but never do. They put this down to the cost of computers. But when people with crazy tempers get mad they don't give a toss about cost; people frequently smash up their most treasured possessions. No, the reason is that our computers hold so much of our past, so many of our records that even in a blind frenzy we know it would be imbecilic to give them the pasting they deserve. Although people cut off their noses to spite their faces (and worse) and artists and writers sometimes destroy their own creations, our computers contain so much of ourselves it would be kamikaze to destroy them.
Computer rage is another manifestation of that 20th century bugaboo, impatience. Few of us spend enough time learning the basics. We learn the minimum we can get away with and hope to become proficient later. And we do. Painfully. And while doing so we become sloppy, taking short-cuts, knowing errors can almost always be corrected. And almost always they can.
The most unforgivable aspect of 20th century impatience is that no sooner have we acquired some amazing technological widget than we start to grumble about its imperfections. Dishwashers, microwaves-not to mention cars-have all suffered the same fate. Cell phones epitomise this phenomenon. The instant we get a mobile we start to complain about lousy reception, flat batteries, tunnel blackout and how being always on-call is a pain. Computers are, of course, unbelievably miraculous. But they have been launched while still young. They will soon be more reliable, simpler to use, more foolproof. But they're not foolproof yet. As this fool keeps on proving.
