I was going to rave about the start of football season, but for some strange reason, I am getting an 'internal server error' when trying to upload the image that was to accompany 'my sto-ry.' Thus, football is out! In its place . . . . stupid computers!
Do you remember the first time you worked for hours, typing an paper that was likely due in a few short hours, when Zap, it was gone? Your computer decided it hated you and there was nothing you could do about it. (If you need, please take a few seconds to calm down before going on.) . . . (Okay, I'm ready.) Do you remember the second time it happened??? The third?????? Or are you one of those people who actually learned to save their files as they worked? Perhaps you are one of the rare creatures who saves every 5 minutes, backs-up to disk every 10 minutes and e-mails the file to themselves every 20 minutes. Not you? I haven't met that person either. (As if to prove my point, I just got an error message from the 'auto save' feature of blogspot: "! Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail. Retrying . . ." - Time to copy to a text file!!!)
** We now go to Mike, who's joining us live from in the field. Mike, can you tell us where you are? ** Yeah Ken, I'm standing here in the middle of WordPad. Windows are crashing all around me . . . **
How is it that we have come to rely so heavily upon an inanimate object that so often shows its disdain for us by not functioning as we see fit? Y2K, at the least, showed our fear of losing our computers. People were like, "Oh man, the world's going to end and computers are going to come alive and eat my pet chihuahua and I'm going to miss the first Simpsons episode of the new year!!!" Yeah, it was crazy!
But honestly, I think it would be quite interesting to see our society try to recover from such a devastating loss. Just watch how a person reacts when their cell phone stops cooperating for a few minutes or their e-mail goes down. How do you think they would cope if they had to permanently resort to writing actual letters.
So will our computers ever fail us? I expect they might. Perhaps I will not live to see it (except on a personal level), but I cannot imagine a world in which some element of society, or a society itself, lasts forever. History has shown us as much.
I will leave you with this quote which has been burning in my mind, asking to be typed. It is from Mr. Albert Einstein. He said, "I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
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