Or, why can’t a computer be more like a toaster?
~a column by Colleen O’Brien
My computer, with Microsoft Word paid for and installed, is back on track, after several days of black screen when I punch its button. This computer vacation did give me a respite from the news, an oddly satisfying feeling of living on a deserted island, accompanied, however, by the anxiety in being unable to write a column that I am supposed to send easily to my editor on a certain date.
I gave up and took my computer to my best friend at Best Buy, and the electronic beast turned on for my Geek friend right away. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with your computer, Colleen.”
I looked at him and my fickle computer with consternation.
Does this mean it’s my fault? I actually asked my Geek friend this, and he just looked at me as if to say, “Duh.”
Which I did not believe.
What this sudden turn-on of my sometimes trusty/often lazy? moody? computer has done to me is make me grateful for it coming to life as I punch its button. I don’t want to be grateful to the little ingrate. I’ve long employed a daily practice of being grateful for many things – the sun in the morning, the moon at night, etc. – and now I have to be grateful for an electronic device when it actually springs to life? Help me, Universe.
It runs my life, this computing device that only computes when it wants to. It’s an iffy situation that I have to wonder at my sudden gratitude for the piece of equipment when it decides to actually work.
I look forward to it accompanying my morning coffee and when it won’t turn on, I have to read a magazine rather than look up the news and check to see if I have any personal emails. Fractures my nerves.
All I ask for is simple: I want my computer to act like my toaster – in other words, an appliance that works on demand: when I push the bread in, it gets warm, then hot, then brown, then pops up, toasted. An appliance that knows its job.
My feelings regarding my computer sound like the line in the play ‘My Fair Lady’: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Not that I want my computer to be a man, I just want it to work when I speak to it by turning it on. But maybe it is a misogynist – silent, touchy, belligerent, not in the mood, too tired to work out the domestic problem, mean-spirited.
I do know that a computer is more complicated than a toaster – like a woman is more complicated than a man. But to have to deal with a piece of metal/gold/silver/copper/plastic/ whatever else it’s made of . . . is annoying as hell. I never swore to love, honor and obey it; I spent hundreds of dollars so it would love, honor and obey me. Dealing with humans is exhausting enough.
Why can’t my computer be more like a toaster?
