TECHNOFEAR AND TRANSFERENCE

Here’s a thought designed to make all but the most stout-hearted of fellows remain cowering under the duvet in blind technofear as we start this merry day. Every day, someone somewhere switches on their computer and it doesn’t behave quite in the way it should. Something, and you rarely know what it is until it makes itself known to you, usually at the most annoying moment possible, will not do what it is supposed to in quite the way that you expect it to, when you need it to.

“Well, there’s nothing unusual in that,” you’re quite possibly thinking, “it happens to me all the time…” but, just because we’ve kind of learned to accept it doesn’t mean that it’s the sort of thing we can become complacent about. I mean, we all now how simple (and yet massively complicated) our lives have become since the computers moved out of their vast chambers in the bowels of NASA and into the specially cleared corners of almost every home, or perched atop our own thighs, or tucked snugly into our pockets. Only a generation ago, the paraphernalia of the office worker included maybe a pen, a blotter, an ashtray and a telephone sitting on a vast acreage of polished oak (I watch a lot of seventies drama...) and the thought of each little workstation transforming into a cubicle with its own computer within would have been laughed away, if you’d ever thought of and mentioned such a thing.

Nowadays the little so-and-sos have their tiny little electronic claws deeply embedded inside practically every single aspect of our daily lives and yet we still allow them their little foibles as if they were cute and endearing precocious children whose little whims we indulge and tolerate. If ever there was a time for some stern parenting it is probably now.

Every time you switch the blighter on, there’s basically a ‘start up’ routine that your electronic chum goes through to get itself to a point of functionality and on the odd or (if you prefer) occasional morning your particular electronic device, no matter how fancy or state-of-the-art it might be, will arbitrarily decide to skip a bit of it for no good reason at all.

Anyway, as I so often do, I have digressed. What was that thought that I mentioned? Oh yes. The problem for me is, if it’s so common that it happens all the time, doesn’t that mean that it happens occasionally when the pilot boots up the aircraft’s onboard computer systems or the doctor kicks up the medical scanning software? That’s a hell of a thing to only find out at 30,000 feet or after the tumour has become the size of a tennis ball.

It’s mildly interesting that almost as soon as I started putting these thoughts together a few days ago, our beloved host “Blogger” started to have some kind of a meltdown which lasted for at least two days and made the position of Lesser Blogfordshire and its stablemates very precarious indeed for a while. I even started to consider a move across to some other place although the amount of faff that this would have entailed eventually dissuaded me, although, because, it’s always good to have a backup plan, I decided that it was time to take advantage of another account I’d set up “just in case” this kind of thing happened and just dump everything there. A backup back-up plan, so to speak.

It turned out to be a bad idea. A really bad idea. Huge chunks of the weekend got eaten away by trying to achieve nothing very much in particular except a duplication, an alternative viewpoint if not actually an alternative point of view, and an ultimately massively time-consuming discovery about how ‘labels’ work.

Sadly what this ultimately meant was that instead of focussing on my content, I spent much of that weekend rather pointlessly tinkering with the layouts and tabs and categories of all my transferred files and not being able to get the imported text to behave quite as it should. Just putting in returns to add space between paragraphs seems to be beyond me on the ‘transferred’ files’ paragraph breaks and default fonts and, as I really don’t have the spare time to go through and individually edit all of my postings so that the paragraph spacing works properly and as beautifully as it once did, there now remains a little demon whispering in my ear about the inelegance of how much of my old prose appears therein. Never mind, it’s been set as ‘author only’ so nobody should see such horrors except me (although I have my doubts with the wicked old internet’s ability to probe and ferret out all manner of hidden things).

I also had to navigate my other ‘backup’ plan. Using the alternative browser because ‘Safari’ (which always brings to mind Christopher Biggins and his catchphrase “Safari-So-goody” on the old children’s TV quiz show “On Safari” which also introduced Gillian Taylforth to a wider world…) is dealing with things in a way that can only be described as ‘so-baddy’ and, on occasion, and for certain websites, I now have to launch “Firefox” which is a whole new chicken coop of issues of transference, preference and forgotten login details.

I like things to just work, I seldom enjoy change (especially for changes sake), which is why I’m terribly impatient with the various power supply companies and banks whenever they call me up and try to offer me a ‘great new deal’. The pennies I might save or the pitifully miniscule amount of extra interest I might earn are so massively offset by the sheer degree of irritation and concern that I would have to go through to successfully navigate such a minefield. I know what happens. You get a phone call telling you everything’s going to be simple and just peachy and then your financial life goes down the plughole for six weeks as payments, wages and bills just disappear into the ether.

Of course there comes a time when even the back-up plans come to naught, and such is the cascading nature of these problems that when the broadband connection itself died on the following Monday morning, I really wasn’t at all surprised.

Obviously, when computer minds do finally inherit the earth, it’s useful to know that we could claim our planet back by switching them off at the wall and that even they are going to wake up on the odd morning and not be firing on quite all of their cylinders. The ‘brave new world’ will be just as subject to moods and irritations and accidents and gremlins as our old one was.

In passing, it is (slightly) interesting to note that when it comes to the ‘white heat’ (or should that now be ‘light speed’?) of new technology, the 25 year old BBC “Domesday” project is having to have its data recovered having been stored upon the then cutting-edge videodisc format which is, of course, now obselete. Interestingly enough the data found in the thousand year old technology of the original Domesday Book is still recoverable.

Just a thought…