Chapter Fourteen: IT

I could write a book about IT. (Maybe next time.)

First off, if you don’t know what “IT” is beyond an impersonal pronoun, or excellent Stephen King-adapted TV miniseries: consider yourself lucky.

Any tome on IT would have to be written in two parts: First, “Here’s how a computer works,” followed by “Here’s why this has no bearing on how decent or intelligent of a person you are.”

The world of IT is always split between logic and emotion—the failure to understand something, followed by the anger of failing to understand. I could expound for years on how things work, only to be assaulted with a landslide of questions about how any of it could possibly make sense. “You should all brush your teeth twice daily,” I could say, only to be met with “But I do, and I still have cavities!”

To embrace the world of IT and computers, you need to embrace the nature of the universe. It’s a complex and bewildering place, full of variables that we, as humans, try to flatten out and make linear. We draw conclusions based on the idea that x plus y unfailingly leads to z, while the universe computes the outcome using seventeen derivatives and several imaginary numbers. In the end, we’re screwed, and have no idea why. X plus y yields pudding, so we take to our beds.

Rational human beings look at their computers the same way they do their cars. They think that, with timely tire rotations and oil changes, life will continue in perfect working order indefinitely. What they fail to consider is all the driving that’s going on in the meantime—the hard stops, fast accelerations, and six times that they missed the parking lot cutout and dropped the rear end off the curb. With both computers and cars, they think that any engineer worth their salt must have taken these things into account, so the culpability for anything that goes wrong must trace back to poor design, or incompetent technicians. It couldn’t possibly be the operator.

I live for moments when I run into those souls who assume the Three Vital Givens:

1. The computer is fundamentally perfect.

2. I use the computer fundamentally perfectly.

3. Any aberrations are a result of someone else failing to keep the computer in its proper operating form.

You can see them coming from a mile away. They call, and leave a voice message, which consists of three and a half minutes of description of what a shock the problem is, and how it could not have arisen through anything else but negligence. (Not their own.) Then comes a thirty second detail of all the emotional trauma the issue has caused, along with a spectacularly detailed description of all the productivity that’s been annihilated. Finally, we get to the issue itself, which is generally either A) negligible and readily solvable, or B) insurmountable by design, and is only an issue because everyone wants computers to match their personal workflows—however convoluted—because good technology should do that seamlessly and automatically. Anything that requires accommodation is simply an unaddressed flaw. There’s some way to make it work the way it’s “supposed” to; it’s just that no one wants to take the time.

In the last five seconds of the call, they finally leave their callback number.

My favorite issues are ones of concurrence. “I changed my desktop picture, and suddenly, I lost my network connection. Now, why is that?” That’s like asking why your car stopped running after you put new floor mats in it. Is there any sane reason why one event would cause the other? No. Safe in that knowledge, you might look a little further. Did you remember to put gas in the car yesterday, after you decided to take a serendipitous trip to the auto store to buy those car mats? No? Do you think that the fuel gauge, now resting on “E,” might be a contributing factor to the issue at hand?

Crickets chirping?

Other people have unassailable patterns when it comes to working with technology. If it doesn’t work, power it off and back on. (This mantra of “did you restart it?” troubleshooting makes me cringe, because it’s one that we tech-folk inadvertently set in motion, and now we’re paying the penalty for its popularity—instead of being able to diagnose problems in the wild as they happen, we get handed a pummeled box of broken parts after the fact, along with an indecipherable story of how it came to be.) If your car radio doesn’t want to remember your favorite station, will turning off the key while driving resolve the issue? Might there be unintended repercussions to shutting the engine off and powering it back on while the wheels are still turning? Could cutting the power to your steering system cause a bit of an unexpected effect when you’re in motion? Instead of knee-jerk responses, what we might be wanting to instill is a moment of calm reflection, and a pause for assessment when something goes wrong, rather than an overwhelming desire to start pressing buttons and yanking cables.

Computers cause otherwise intelligent human beings to let their brains slide right out of their ears. Someone who has a strong command of logic in their everyday lives just lets go of the wheel when it comes to the computer. If they tried to close their desk drawer—and it refused—they’d look for a file folder sticking up in the back. But if the computer won’t start, it’s because something is terribly wrong, something only someone else more qualified to handle the issue can resolve. It couldn’t be because the computer is unplugged, or the battery is dead. That sort of stuff isn’t even worth checking. What’s worse, even when shown the dead battery or unplugged cable: instead of feeling like a rightful idiot, the user laughs it off, then does it all over again the next time. There’s not only no incentive to learn, there’s no reason to feel embarrassed at being silly.

Where did this never-ending cycle of learned helplessness come from, anyway?

If you think life was simpler back-when, it was. Obviously, when typewriters ruled the Earth, and transistor radios were the most cantankerous things we had to deal with, it was easier to cope with life’s complexities. Moreover, with a radio or a TV, it either worked or it didn’t. If you couldn’t tune it, something was hosed. Call the technician and have a cigarette.

With computers, life started out in the realm of TV tuning. Back when they were behemoth, interlinked monstrosities, the computer was one organism with a satellite neural network of users. It had one brain and one team of people who kept that brain healthy. They chose what programs were installed, how they were maintained, and how often they were updated. If someone had a problem, the system and possibilities were finite—either you had a bad cable or some glitch with the software. Regardless, there were only so many things to go wrong.

This pattern continued through the eighties and early nineties, as huge mainframes gave way to gaggles of independent desktop computers. Networked together or not, they were still assembled and maintained by collectives of people who knew about the care and feeding of the animal. Home computers notwithstanding—when your seventeen year old choked the thing with every piece of software on which he could place his alarmingly eager hands—the systems were still well-controlled. They were still finite. Maybe the computer was an island, as with the home machine. Maybe it was a network of hundreds, or even thousands—but the organism as a whole was still well-defined. There were only so many places to look when something went wrong.

Then came the Internet. Enter the harbinger of chaos, and the assassin of reason and sanity.

Like a Whitman’s sampler, it first arrived in morsels. Constrained by tedious phone-line connections, we were dosed its hallucinogens in five-hour increments, often only enough to check e-mail occasionally, or download one big file, if you left the thing on all night. Hopefully, in the morning, you had something new to play with; if not, you waited until the next month, when you got a fresh dose of fiddle-time.

THE NEXT MONTH. Good Lord, the patience we had back then.

Restrained by availability, there simply was no good way to run amok. As the medium fledged, websites were novelties and no one had yet put forth the effort and hard work to create malicious software, nor insidious ways to deliver it. Put simply: in the early days, you really had to work to screw things up. If something went wrong the morning after you downloaded a new copy of whatever-it-was, then you knew immediately what caused your computer to turn into tapioca afterward. Cause and effect were still very solidly connected.

If you didn’t have the Internet, it was no big deal, because programs were things you could buy at the store, and you could futz around with word processing, or work with things that lived locally on your machine. The Internet was just the icing on the cake, and hadn’t become the cake itself.

As the nineties wore on, however, our appetite for computer junk-food grew. The increasing polish of the Internet beckoned us onward, and we began feeling our way through its endless webs. Remember when everyone Yahooed? Suddenly, there was a gathering point, a place where we could all start, to embark on journeys through the web that took us to information, downloads, and porn-galore.

When the Internet became the thing we wanted when we powered-on the computer, the whole world changed. Instead of getting programs from a store piecemeal, we tore through them in droves. Download this; install that. Much like the hazy and dehydrated morning after a drinking binge, the details of what we did last night online became fuzzy at best. If the computer was a steaming pile on our desk, figuring out which program defecated it was difficult.

Fast-forward to the present, and our access to this web of uncontrolled nuttiness is nearly unrestricted. No computer worth having is an island anymore, and even system administrators at power plants are creating peninsulas so that they can remote-control once solitary computers from home. Every computer that gets hooked up to the Internet becomes beholden to its Gomorrah, and proactive carefulness gives way to reactive clean-up when something goes wrong.

Whereas the earlier computers were relatively self-contained and possible to troubleshoot as a singular system, everything is now connected to a quagmire of crud that no one actually controls. The Internet is endless freedom. It’s also endless chaos, because with freedom comes zero accountability in a faceless, virtual world.

From the technician’s point of view, previously isolated computers became mere nodes in a sea of other unknown computers. You could carefully build and maintain your machines, but once they were connected to the Internet, all bets were off. Even if you tried to install every tool and configure every option to prevent catastrophe, the sheer magnitude of chance precluded any hope of keeping events on the straight and narrow path. All it took was one chance encounter with a nefarious website or program, and all was lost, until the computer was rebuilt, and the data restored, and then, a period of watchful waiting ensued until the next disaster arrived.

I once had a user who described computer screw-ups as “technical kafoobles.” The Internet is a swirling miasma of kafoobles—a digital game of Russian roulette. It should come with a message that pops up every time you connect, warning you that by doing anything, your computer and its content will assuredly be destroyed someday.

Let’s revisit the comforting world of cars. We take for granted the peaceful commute, and the long stretches of prosperous transportation that fill the gaps between hair-pulling mechanical failures. But we also take in stride the fact that, by leaving the garage in the morning, we’re opening ourselves up to a hostile world of potentially devastating events. We might come back from the grocery store to find a huge dent in our door. We might total our cars on the way home from church, and we all might die in the process.

Frustrating and sobering as that assumption is, we accept it because we enjoy the rewards of mobility, and those rewards still outweigh Those Things That Might Happen. But in a very similar jungle, we insist that computers should be better than that.

Until we turn everything back over to a handful of trained people who specialize in caring for technology, and disconnect ourselves from the endless network of unknown entities that promise to sodomize our computers at every turn, we can’t hope to avoid the consequences. Entropy begets entropy: if we want order, we have to participate in a structured system. There’s no hope for sanity when we link-up everyday to a whirling ball of chaos, and struggle to stay afloat.

Of course, we won’t do that. As freedom-loving people, it’s anathema to think that we’d ever dial it back. Thus: we lower our heads, and press onward.

We do it with cars, and we take it in stride. It’s time to do it with computers. The successful warrior of the modern computing world has the flexibility and adaptability to deal with adversity as it arises. Those of us who are more the hunter-gatherer types have to accept the fact that we need to befriend those warriors for those times when things get out of control. In the meantime, call the technician and have a cigarette.

The sooner you accept that—in life, cars, and computers—you really don’t have any control over anything in this world but yourself, the better and more relaxed you’ll be.

Now, have a martini and fire-up the typewriter.