Pinkerton's Weblog

Meet The New DOS; Same As The Old DOS

I was reading some old crank columnist today, who was harping on the old saw all humorous authors over forty tend to hammer away on: the incomprehensibility of computers.

Being in my 20s, I've lived with computers most of my life, and so probably use a mouse with more dexterity than I would a fork (the fact that I have no dexterity with a fork whatsoever, and in fact often stab myself in the forearm while attempting to eat peas should not detract from this). So it always irritates me to hear these people tell their little jokes at the expense of the computer, when anyone who remotely knew how to use one would find the jokes stupid and even erroneous.

A typical joke in the essay involved the author harping on the admittedly silly alternatives Microsoft Word's SpellCheck feature suggests for words it thinks are misspelled. Fair enough. But the author then goes on to state how he was, he maintains, bullied into taking the suggestions, and was then stuck with the changes, and so on and so on, with the upshot of the experience being that he had to go through his document manually, undoing all of the computer's changes. The author used the entire experience, and similar experiences, to harp on about the uselessness of computers.

Having used Microsoft Word's SpellCheck feature many times, I can attest to the fact that while the feature is most assuredly useless, it also provides you with a wealth of choices as to whether or not every instance of a word should be changed, or one instance, or no instances, or even your own suggestion substituted. Even in the worst case scenario this author puts forward, where the computer has apparently taken sadistic control of all functions and is inserting the word "Rockfort cheese" for every instance of the word "Oldsmobile", it's still just a simple matter of hitting CTRL-Z. In other words, the author is taking a computer to task for not being able to compensate better for the author's ignorance of the proper use of computers. It seems to be a an increasingly typical North American stance, and it bothers me to no end. If this same author wrote about the uselessness of cars, complaining that a few random jabs at the stick shift and flooring the gas pedal while in park made the car smoke and stop working, and the author concluded that cars were stupid, I'm sure most people would agree that the car wasn't the problem; the author simply needs to learn how to drive a car. Yet with computers, and so many other neat toys and gadgets, the many ageing technophobes of the world seem to be our unfortunate mouthpiece. A note to these mouthpieces: computers are not out to get you, they only do what you tell it to do, so if you tell it to do something stupid, it will. Also, VCR clock functions are not difficult to program.

I ran into another variation of this problem recently when I had the new Windows XP installed onto my office computer, and found to my considerable disdain that many of the once-useful features I'd used often were now replaced with alternatives clearly catering to computer users with a hefty surplus of redundant genes. Take the Search/Find feature, for instance, which I used to be able to use easily and within seconds, searching by file name or type. I now have a yapping cartoon dog who speaks to me in annoying cartoon word balloons. Every conceivable option is outlined in idiot-proof detail, down to such needless options as "Are you sure you want to search" or "Are you looking for the letter K? Because it's on your keyboard." Every once in a while, the cartoon dog will wag its tail or perform an adorable backflip -- which is all well and good, but distracts slightly from the fact that every useful search function once displayed prominently in a no-nonsense window is now buried five sub-folders into the anus of a backflipping beagle.

I begin to wonder if maybe we, and our nation of crotchety old mouthpieces, weren't a little too hard on Microsoft. Yes, their programs have in the past been ludicrously buggy and often mind-boggingly user-apathetic. The difficulty of transporting documents between software by the same company strikes me as a problem that should never have arisen. Yes, the Y2K problem was enormously stupid. And yet, in retrospect, I wonder if the majority of all that anti-computer, anti-Microsoft venom wasn't perpetrated by people who simply can't use computers. I put this idea forward as a plausible one because I note with progressive sadness that every new office product I get for my computer has become more and more idiot-proof. I'm sure this works great for idiots, but it unfortunately presents a bit of a brick wall if you're not one. I put forward the idea that people who are computer illiterate will remain so no matter how many barking dogs you have backflipping on the screen in place of useful functions. I say we cut these sacks of flour loose at the earliest opportunity. Let them make their microsoft jokes and their computer jokes amongst themselves. They're either old or stupid, and they can have all the laughs they want.

Just make the programs with ME in mind, not them, alright? Give them a freaking abacus and let them trot off to a corner to entertain themselves. If you can't work out the principles behind Powerpoint within ten seconds of using it, you don't deserve to have software marketed to you. You should be given an ice cream cone and allowed to wander from your desk happy, where a younger, smarter and vastly more qualified person can change the fonts in the powerpoint header on your behalf.