Labor Saving Devices
Labor Saving Devices
It’s been said of The Luddite that he does not care for technology and the new way of doing things; he either does not understand it or he secretly prays for the Old Days. The Luddite does not know how these calumnies get started.
What The Luddite is opposed to is the waste of his time because no more of it is being made. Make no mistake, The Luddite loves computers and new gadgets very much. He believes that they speed up things immeasurably. It’s when they go wrong that they become an immense pain and actually get in the way.
A perfect example of what The Luddite is talking about is a recent visit to one of the newspaper chains in The Luddite’s hometown. There were no reporters banging away at their keyboards in concentration, no shuffling through notes, and no organizing of contacts. In fact, there was little work being done at all. The reason? They were all waiting for the main computer to be restarted because there was some problem with it that had shut down everything.
No one pulled out a manual typewriter or even a yellow pad and organized his thoughts. That’s what the computer was for and since the computer had shut down, the people had, too.
The Luddite went through an upgrade of his own computer that took almost a month. The reasons for this are that The Luddite has gone from Windows 98 to Windows XP and there are all kinds of compatibility problems involved with the change. Also, things have been going slower because The Luddite does not want to shell out $70 an hour for a tech. Therefore he is having a computer-savvy friend make the changes. She is grimly determined to solve all the problems. She is making progress, but the daunting task of converting from 98 to XP is making things slow. At least the problems have not paralyzed her, as they had in the case of the newspaper minions in the first example. They were all slaves to the computer and believed that since it stopped, they should too.
Computrons will object to this, of course. If you talk to any of them, they make it very clear that if us proles would just learn how to use them correctly, computers wouldn’t give us such a bad time. In technical terms, this is what is called a ‘crock.’
But that is another matter. The defensiveness of computrons and the insistence of people to be slaves to their machines are fodder for other columns. Right now, The Luddite has another bone in his teeth and that is, when computers screw up, they really screw up.
The Luddite will not argue the point that computers speed things along; they do. It’s when they don’t work that things go awry. The computer upgrade has held up The Luddite simply because so many of his notes and files were on his hard disk but there was no way to get at them. And those are just the notes for writing. The upgrade has also prevented The Luddite from doing his taxes because he cannot run the tax software and because many of his records are on his hard drive. The Luddite suspects he is not alone. The entire Y2K fear [remember that thing?] had legs because computers were damn near omnipresent. The spectre of them shutting down or going haywire was pretty scary; so scary that the survivalist industry went great guns starting around 1996.
Computers are victims of their own successes. It’s because they do things so well that people think they can put all or most of their information on them. Consequently they can be very unforgiving when something goes wrong and you try to work around them. You almost have to involve them in a task like professional writing or accounting. When they don’t work, everything is brought to a screeching halt until the computer is fixed. Before, it took something like an office fire to cause that kind of paralysis; now it’s just a computer problem.
The Luddite wishes that computers were more dependable, or even more to the point, that people would not dislike their work so much that they use a downed computer as an excuse.
It’s been said of The Luddite that he does not care for technology and the new way of doing things; he either does not understand it or he secretly prays for the Old Days. The Luddite does not know how these calumnies get started.
What The Luddite is opposed to is the waste of his time because no more of it is being made. Make no mistake, The Luddite loves computers and new gadgets very much. He believes that they speed up things immeasurably. It’s when they go wrong that they become an immense pain and actually get in the way.
A perfect example of what The Luddite is talking about is a recent visit to one of the newspaper chains in The Luddite’s hometown. There were no reporters banging away at their keyboards in concentration, no shuffling through notes, and no organizing of contacts. In fact, there was little work being done at all. The reason? They were all waiting for the main computer to be restarted because there was some problem with it that had shut down everything.
No one pulled out a manual typewriter or even a yellow pad and organized his thoughts. That’s what the computer was for and since the computer had shut down, the people had, too.
The Luddite went through an upgrade of his own computer that took almost a month. The reasons for this are that The Luddite has gone from Windows 98 to Windows XP and there are all kinds of compatibility problems involved with the change. Also, things have been going slower because The Luddite does not want to shell out $70 an hour for a tech. Therefore he is having a computer-savvy friend make the changes. She is grimly determined to solve all the problems. She is making progress, but the daunting task of converting from 98 to XP is making things slow. At least the problems have not paralyzed her, as they had in the case of the newspaper minions in the first example. They were all slaves to the computer and believed that since it stopped, they should too.
Computrons will object to this, of course. If you talk to any of them, they make it very clear that if us proles would just learn how to use them correctly, computers wouldn’t give us such a bad time. In technical terms, this is what is called a ‘crock.’
But that is another matter. The defensiveness of computrons and the insistence of people to be slaves to their machines are fodder for other columns. Right now, The Luddite has another bone in his teeth and that is, when computers screw up, they really screw up.
The Luddite will not argue the point that computers speed things along; they do. It’s when they don’t work that things go awry. The computer upgrade has held up The Luddite simply because so many of his notes and files were on his hard disk but there was no way to get at them. And those are just the notes for writing. The upgrade has also prevented The Luddite from doing his taxes because he cannot run the tax software and because many of his records are on his hard drive. The Luddite suspects he is not alone. The entire Y2K fear [remember that thing?] had legs because computers were damn near omnipresent. The spectre of them shutting down or going haywire was pretty scary; so scary that the survivalist industry went great guns starting around 1996.
Computers are victims of their own successes. It’s because they do things so well that people think they can put all or most of their information on them. Consequently they can be very unforgiving when something goes wrong and you try to work around them. You almost have to involve them in a task like professional writing or accounting. When they don’t work, everything is brought to a screeching halt until the computer is fixed. Before, it took something like an office fire to cause that kind of paralysis; now it’s just a computer problem.
The Luddite wishes that computers were more dependable, or even more to the point, that people would not dislike their work so much that they use a downed computer as an excuse.
posted by S. Olson at 7:54 PM
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