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Saturday, May 10, 2008

The Joy of Computers

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Computers are our friends. They save us so much time. They make our world so much easier. They make our errors so much more catastrophic.

The program that handles my E-Mail works well, but if you paste something big into the address block, it blows up and crashes the computer.

Now, this should not happen if I am paying attention, but life is full of distractions. The phone rings, someone says something, you allow your mind to wander from the mundane task of getting an E-mail ready to the next thing you need to do right now. You forget that the thing in you paste key is not an address, but the file you want to send. Sometimes you do not forget, but the mouse simply fails to transmit that click you just did to the program to let the program know you want what you are about to paste to be in the body of the message, not the address area. No matter how it happens, the result is a crash. A crash where the escape keys do not work, but only rebooting the machine can get things restarted.

So now you waste time waiting for the machine to restart, then you waste time trying to find the extent of the catastrophe (did you hit all the right save keys before the computer crashed, or are you going to have to rebuild a file). Sometimes you spend additional hours recreating a lost file.

Computers are great and wonderful, life as we know it would be so much different without them, and they do not crash THAT often. But when they do . . .

Most computers are probably not replaced because they are old, but probably because the "User" lost it when the computer crashed and destroyed that one vital file or vital connection and . . . well computers are not real good at defending themselves from having chairs hammered on them. (No, I did not do that, but the urge was there . . . old caveman instincts die hard in the DNA.)