Cape Town - I remember a time when there were no computers.
No, this is not a nostalgia-filled wander down the innocent paths of my youth. I love computers and the Internet and gadgets and all things techie. If I were a teenager now and planning a career, I would probably be yearning to become a developer.
I am always the one at work who gets asked to help other people figure out why "it" (aka the computer) won't do as it should. I have friends who phone for help when the font has gone all small. I love all the nit-picky troubleshooting that is required to make a recalcitrant Windows XP brick vaguely usable.
But there is one machine that is calculated to stop me in my tracks.
The printer. Any printer. All the printers I have ever known and hated.
Why are they so badly designed? Why do they require expensive toner all the time? Why do they just stop working? Why do they stop working just at the moment when you must have a document printed? Why can't one of the really big companies get their wizards to figure out one set of protocols and drivers and connections that work universally?
Our very own piece of black plastic this week stopped working. It was "not responding". It turned out that because I had reset the wifi security key, the printer had to be re-paired with the router. I sorted it out eventually but not before I had had to restrain myself from throwing it against a wall.
Reflecting on it now, I see that the printer had a point: I should have thought about that wireless connection when I changed the password. But my built-in assumption that "it" was doing it on purpose to annoy me led a lot of unseemly (and unnecessary) language.
It's interesting, this rage we feel when technology fails us. I think the anger comes from two things: we think of the computer or printer in personal terms, as if it intends to irritate us. And we allow our assumptions about what is wrong to stand in the way of step-by-step troubleshooting.
It seems much easier in the heat of the moment to fantasise about just breakng the machine. When we have calmed down and fixed the problem (or phoned a friend) we realise that the fault was almost always something we had done wrong. And then we have a wave of relief that we did not in fact kill the machine. And some shame at the dreadful things we shouted, and the time we wasted.
I joked to a colleague after the Great Printer Incident that I was suffering from Fear Of Killing the Computer, which produces the satisfying acronym FOKC. I encourage you to use it loudly next time your printer won't work (but not if your boss happens to be nearby).
And as for me, I am off to apologise to my Canon. I really was rather rude to it.
IOL
@reneemoodie
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