The Alternative Remedies Guide

After five years of mostly loyal service, my trusty computer finally gave up the ghost on me, recently.

It had been on it’s last legs for some time, so the other week I decided to bite the bullet and replace it, and now I’m sitting at my desk most days with something that’s loosely comparable to the HAL 9000.

I was aware, in the general sense, of just how fast the world of computers moves. With constant technological advances, anything you buy today will be obsolete fairly soon. However, I hadn’t banked on just how fast the whole design of computers changes.

My old computer was boxy and white, it had cables running to and from anything connected to it, and it had to be given an order to do something.

HAL, on the other hand, is all wireless. It’s grey and sleek. And it seems to be thinking for itself at least half the time. It knows more than I do, and worse yet, it KNOWS that it knows more than I do.

The wireless aspect, especially, bothers me. Somehow, when I type something, it is transferred to the screen without any sort of physical connection. This computer could run on voodoo for all I know. I know that if something is working, I should just shut up and be glad of it, but I’m just too paranoid by nature not to find stuff like this weird. I don’t like not knowing how my computer does things, I feel like it’s mocking me.

I’ll give you an example. The other day, I was collecting various links for a project I was working on, and decided to make a separate folder in the “Favourites” box in my web browser. I then told the computer to hide the folder so it didn’t pop up every time, which, of course, it did. What I hadn’t banked on was that it hid it so well that I haven’t been able to find it, since. For all I know, it’s down the back of my sofa. HAL certainly isn’t telling.

It’s also a lot faster. I don’t understand data-compression – indeed, I don’t really feel I have to – but somehow it saves songs to it’s memory in less time than it takes to play them. That’s more than I can do.

You can play me a song and after a few run-throughs I can pick up the basic chords and the words. What I cannot do, however, is hear the opening bars and then sing you the whole thing verbatim and quote you the changes for every instrument needed. HAL can.

In short, it’s scary.

Like all guys, I have the creeping fear of turning into my father. I think a major sign of the fact that you’re getting older is when technology overtakes you. I was fine with my old computer, understood it implicitly, it was the kind I used in high school.

HAL, on the other hand, is part of a new breed. I wouldn’t be entirely shocked to learn that it chooses to look like a computer, and is in fact made of some sort of liquid metal that can imitate whatever it feels like when my back is turned.

Admittedly, I have a ways to go before I’m as baffled by technology as dad is. He often shouts at the TV remote for not doing what he wants it to, and, unable to get rid of the menu he has somehow brought up, will sulkily sit and watch TV around a box of options in the middle of the screen that obscures most of the picture.

It’s beginning to get the better of me, though. My old computer had an endearing quirk, if by endearing I mean “makes you want to kick it out of the window.” Sometimes, through stretching or leaning or whatever, I would mash a random selection of buttons on the keyboard and something unusual would happen. Either it would deleted everything I’d been doing forever, or the screen saver would come on, or, once, an inter-dimensional vortex was opened to the planet Noquilon, although admittedly that was after a very long stretch and a lot of button mashing.

I haven’t the faintest ideal of how I used to pull this off, but it made some sort of sense. Random button pressing can lead to unexpected events. Only fair, really.

HAL, on the other hand, does it of it’s own accord. I press a series of buttons that seem perfectly logical and it still does something that, more often than not, leaves me staring, slack-jawed, at the screen. It’s entirely too much technology for my mind to handle; I’m like a monkey with a lawn mower, or George Bush with an entire nuclear arsenal.

Proof, if proof were needed, that machines are evolving too fast comes from the little “help” characters. My old computer had a cartoon paper clip as your little “help” bringer. Recently when I tried to search for yet-another file that HAL had hidden, I was guided by a Labrador.

Not only did the Labrador find files that I was convinced no longer existed anywhere in the known universe, but I realised that as such, in the space of five years, the help icon has progressed from an inanimate, simple object that would sit on my desk and do simple things when needed to something that can sit, stay, get the paper and piss on my shoes.

If that isn’t a powerful metaphor, I don’t know what is.

Luke Haines