Chain Smoking Blue Monkey

Individual trees. If you walk through the forest then trees are everywhere, and if you walk in a straight line in the forest you eventually will hit a tree dead on and not be able to go any further. If you don’t look around and continue to hit the same tree repeatedly and then die of starvation in the forest then you are stupid. Stop hitting the same tree, please. Step back. Look around. Understand that there are many trees that can get in your way, and yet all you need to do to travel through the forest is to simply walk around each tree.

Wired’s Bruce Schneier talks about the consquences of the internet being your hard drive.

Mainly he is discussing the idea of relying on third party services for keeping the information you want to keep accessible and the downsides and dangers of relying on other people for what you think is important.

I recently heard someone who had stored many pictures on Flickr without any additional backup had their account hacked into and all of the pictures deleted. This was a paid account, mind you, not a free one. They requested assistance and received, well, nothing. “Sorry, that’s not our problem.” i.e. Flickr has no back up at all. If you get hacked and your stuff deleted you don’t have recourse. Such are the vagaries of cheap and unlimited storage. To Flickr, as well as Google I am sure, the only things backed up are critical systems and the date on those systems. You may be part of the great experiment, but you aren’t critical until there are millions of you and it’s happening all at one time. In this case, it is the opposite of the old saying. One person is a statistic, a million people is a tragedy.

I spent 45 minutes of my morning troubleshooting an issue over the phone with someone.  They have a work laptop that they take home and they can’t get to work for them.  At work, the computer is fine, and I suspect that if I took the computer to my own home and connected to my wireless network that it would work fine.  However, for this person, no, it doesn’t work fine.  It works sporadically.  And so it falls to me to do “my job” and to assist the person over the phone in making an effort to determine the problem through a series of troubleshooting steps.  One of those steps is the obvious one of eliminating possible causes of the problem or eliminating those things which are NOT the problem.  Of course, it seems obvious to me to do the process of elimination.  With computer tech you are left with one of the few areas of life that you actually can treat like a dime store mystery novel in the process of eliminating suspects.  It’s entirely procedural and a step by step process.  What it isn’t is randomly guessing what the problem might be based on partial knowledge you have seeped up along the way in conversations and newspaper articles about technology.  Dumbing down happens, and when you overhear a conversation and pick up only the bits you understand a little of and take those as entirely accurate descriptions of reality, you should know that you only have part of the story.  None of us will ever have the whole story, of course.  But some of us WILL have more of the story.  And that “more” of the story is what differentiates supposed experts from novices.  “Experts” just spend more time doing something over and over again, and in some cases that means reading and learning the same things over and over again.  When you pick up just enough to be dangerous then you are not actually helping yourself.  And if you ask an “expert” for help to solve a problem but refuse to follow even the most simple steps or answer even the most simple questions, then you are never going to actually solve the problem.  You are going to make it worse.

I help people with computers.  My job is not to pull teeth.  If we are talking to each other and I am asking questions or giving instructions it is in the service of reaching the end goal that you desire.  You are not necessarily expected to learn anything at all from a troubleshooting interaction.  If you ARE expected to learn something from the interaction, the good tech will summarize that at the end (and hopefully in a follow up email).  But I should not have to coerce you or lay out bait for you to tell me what I need to know to HELP you.  If you are coming for help you must also provide help to the person attemtping to provide help for you.  You must help in the form of providing information and following steps.  And if you don’t understand the steps you should always feel free to simply say “I don’t understand.  Can you simplify that anymore than you already have?”

What it comes down to, though, is sad and simple and not about technology at all but about customer service:  Customer service jobs are fucking nightmares.   They are nightmares for both the customer and the service.  If you receive good customer service that means you are lucky to get a patient person on the phone.  If you receive good customers as a service person then it means exactly the same thing: you are lucky to get a patient person on the phone.

Nightmare customer service can stem from many things, such as lack of knowledge or communication skills.  But most poor customer service is simply because one or the other or both people on the phone lack patience and are not bothering postponing their impatience.  Customers want problems solved NOW NOW NOW.  Customer service wants to solve the problem as quickly as possible as well.  Maybe not “NOW NOW NOW” but the sooner the better.   Now we are basically just an entire country of impatient people attempting more often than not to be a service oriented society.  We are increasingly impatient on both sides of the equation, and worse is that we are propogating the idea that “The customer is always right.” when quite often the customer isn’t right at all.  The customer can’t be right all the time and it’s a silly concept to start with.  You can’t be right about something you don’t know about.  That’s why you have to CALL customer service.  If you want to be right, then you call consumer relations.  They are PR people and their job is to tell you how great your company is, and one function of that is to please the customer to the point of making the customer feel that, yes, indeed, they ARE always right.

In the day to day “Have you restarted it?” life of a CSBmonkey, there are a few constants, and one of those is the inevitable crashing of these application thingies.  They crash like drunken teenagers on prom night heading home at 5 am in mom’s mini van.  Often, the results are the same.  Split skulls from the impact, brains hanging out and spread across the pavement.  The anguish and the misery that follows a crash is inevitable.  That was important stuff involved in the crash… the graduating high school student and the yearly budget someone forgot to ctrl-s after working on it for 12 hours.  The prom night crash is obvious, though.  Booze.  A little toke after that.  Some grinding and slurping late into the night (what teenager isn’t going to stay awake for that after all?).  The avoidance of teenage high school shooters and slashers (bringing up the question of exactly why we haven’t seen any prom night shootings… I didn’t say it was gonna be a pleasant question).  I mean, it takes everything a 17 year old can muster to get through that night, but computers… well, they’re basically infants and yet we put such high expectations upon them.  “Don’t crash honey, this budget analysis is due tomorrow… oh, nah, we don’t need any protection!  It’s more fun without me sheathing myself with a ctrl-s.  I mean, doesn’t it feel good?”

There are reasons that those application thingies crash.  Good reasons.  Let’s look at one of the most frequently used applications by our friends in the Pacific Northwest, Word.  Here are the various reasons this CSBmonkey has experienced crashes in that most venerable of applications:

*Corrupted normal.dot file
*Corrupted MS Word prefs
*Damaged application
*Damaged word document
*Attempting to access a very large document across an unstable network and the connection being lost
*Sun spots
*Solar flares
*Magnetic fields too close to the computer in the permanent location
*Computer hates being used: a.k.a. the “I’ll show YOU!” syndrome
*Client has failed to meet the computer or the application’s emotional needs
*Screwed up auto-save feature not working properly (probably due to sun spots)
*Auto-Tracking of changes on in those apps (Did you REALLY want to track those changes?  Probably not.  Way to go.)
*Documents were read only and yet let you keep adding stuff to them.  That was funny, wasn’t it?
*Computer has the dumb.
*Infestation of gremlins
*Possession by one or more demonic elements
*Infestation of regular gremlins that don’t know what to do with data
*Karma: computer, client, company client works for, etc. up to no good or was up to no good in the past and now coming back to haunt everyone via the “freeze up Word” method (more common than you think)
*Internet Explorer 7 whacked the crap out of the Office install, and now it’s been uninstalled.  Praise be!  Everything will work fine after this.
*Small, microscopic black hole nexus point at the location where computer freezes up regularly and causing atoms in device to not react in a normal and predictable way
*Similar to microscopic black holes, there could be weird gravity at the location that causes atomic corruption on various levels.  IF ONLY WE COULD REVERSE THE POLARITY WE COULD DETERMINE IF GRAVITY ISSUES ARE AT WORK!

You can see that the reasons are varied, and many.  Your ethics and morals and status as a decent human being weigh heavily in wether or not your computer works properly.  Don’t think Word isn’t watching you.  Don’t think that Excel doesn’t lurk under your bed at night reading your thoughts about the babysitter (or the baby sitter’s brother).  Purity of thought.  Or essence, these are the things that keep a computer running properly.  That and a good tech.

Computers bring out weird instincts.  One of the instincts, oddly enough, is a noble one.  To learn.  To know more than is currently known.  To know how to DO something.  Learning is hard.  I admit that I am impressed when someone expresses an interest in learning more.  Unfortunately, reality is a harsh mistress, and most everyone learns enough to scrap by when it falls outside of what they already know and have grounded themselves in.  Harder still is the deep desire to learn and then move forward with that knowledge.  There’s a wrinkle there.  A smile line.  A crack in the surface.  I try to  hold back, but I cannot.

Whatever you learn today will be obsolete in two years and useless in four.

It is discouraging.  The first step, though, is to admit defeat.  You can’t win this battle.  You can’t know enough today to use new technology tomorrow.  Because this battle isn’t about technology.  It isn’t against technology.  It is about you.  It is against yourself.  It is battle of time and ideas.  Your own ideas wanting to stay static and other people’s ideas wanting to move forward.

I know, I know… it seems like such a good idea to take a class.  To go learn something new.  To spend some time. Some money.  To invest in yourself.  It work in college, didn’t it? In grad school.  The post doc. That all worked… didn’t it? (DIDN’T IT!? OH GOD! SURELY IT WORKED! MY LIFE ISN’T A LIE ALREADY, IS IT?)  The idea is so good.  To learn something new.

There’s an important part of learning something new.  Something we forget to do, which is rather ironic.  We forget to forget.  Don’t forget this: you need to forget what you already know.  What you know now may be useful now.  And tomorrow.  And a little bit after that.  Not forever.  Not even a while.  A while.  What you know now may may not be useful in a short while.  How frustrating.  How daunting.  How… humiliating.

It’s ok, though.  You will make it.  Now you know this.  You still want to learn the new thing I bet.  Frankly, you’re going to have to learn it.  So go ahead and do it.  Learn that thing you need to know.  It’s fine.  Oh, uh, remember this before you go in to learn it though: Don’t overlearn it.  It isn’t gospel.  It isn’t truth.  It’s just, you know, now.  It’s what you need to know to get by.

Technology is a fickle.  It changes a lot and it changes often.  We desperately, desperately want to learn the technology and use it and move forward and then succeed.  We want to learn that thing and go forward.  And once learned, it stays learned, yes?  Surely we all have enough knowledge to get by.  To succeed.  How fast we forget.  We forget that once we listened to albums.  To records.  1/2 at a time.  1/2 from start to finish and then flip the record.  The record!  Yes, then flip the record and complete it all.  We forget that we used to type dir to know what was there.  We forget FF/REW/PLAY used to take some time.  We slowly forget.  We slowly forget when we should quickly forget.  We passively forget when we should actively forget.  Forget the white elephant.  Please.  Just forget it.  FORGET IT!  PLEASE STOP WHAT YOU KNOW NOW!

Admit it.  We are packrats, the whole lot of us.  We are information packrats, sure.  Backups and archives galore.  How far back does YOUR email go?  But we are also knowledge packrats.  Learning packrats.  Skills packrats.  It is so, so hard to determine ahead of time what we will send to the rubbish bin.  What if we NEED that knowledge?!  What if we need that skill?  Forgetting is so hard.  Throwing things out is so hard.

I have supported technological devices for a few years. I have also played with them and been entertained by them all my life. I have also feared them. That probably sounds odd coming from someone who makes their living supporting technological devices. There are a lot of technological devices in the world we have made for ourselves, and frankly I don’t pretend to know much about them all. There are just too many. Too many gadgets. Too much software. Too many ideas and too many ways of thinking. It is impossible for me to know them all or know about them all or to learn very much about them all.

The one technology I support right now has a lot of focus from the world: computers. There is an incredible amount of focus on computers right now because of how much of time, money and effort are being put into computing technologies. This mostly has to do with the web and it’s many grasping fingers that have gotten into our collective psychological pies. Computers have creeped up on us over the past several years as being a primary technology. A technology that many people’s entire lives now depend upon.

When our lives depending upon something we expect that something to “function properly”. In other words, we expect that thing that we depend upon to simply “work”. Let me distill this down to the language that people use. The computer has to work right. Let that phrase in particular linger with you.

The computer has to work right.

That phrase alone should give you pause. It should make you think. The obvious question should come up. Does it? “What is ‘work right’?”

As modern beliefs go, this one is in the family of some ancient beliefs like “What is good?” That may certainly sound pretentious, but if you are someone who isn’t steeped in technology every day, ask yourself what you think your computer “working right” means.

“You know, it should work like it’s supposed to.” An answer as informative as the question. It can’t be ignored, the question that this brings up: “And how is the computer supposed to work?” You start to see a pattern. Certainly a computer is supposed to start up and “work” in some predefined way. That’s the entire point, isn’t it? That the computer will make your life easier? I don’t know. Is that the point? Is that how you define that the computer is “working right”? The computer is indeed supposed to make certain aspects of your life easier. Written communication is easier in that it is instantaneous. (Wait. Did we really want that?) Mathematical calculations of great scale and complexity are easier. (Indeed, this is probably one that we did want. To start with. Not everything is going to benefit from adding complexity.) Being informed and knowledgeable is faster and easier than it has ever been, right? (Ok, a few hoops to get through, sure, but ultimately I can read journal articles and newspapers at home from the couch. That’s progress over me driving to the library and rooting through the stacks, right?)

Is the problem clear yet? Yes or no? Can you define how your computer is “supposed to work”? Can you sufficiently elucidate what that means to you? Or is it like a car? You know it’s supposed to get you from point A to point B, and in between it should “just work”. You know how it’s supposed to work, but you can’t define it. Is it like you’re body? You know mostly when you don’t feel good and you can vaguely approximate the area that doesn’t feel good. Ah, but your car and your body require more than just using them to make sure they work regularly, right? A computer, though. A computer shouldn’t require that, should it? It’s just a box that does some stuff than isn’t that demanding. It’s not a body keeping itself alive. It’s not a car, requiring gasoline every so many miles and oil changes and new tires every so often. Computers certainly aren’t like children or pets, requiring regular attention to keep them alive and healthy. Computer are just… computers. Machines, sort of. Like a washing machine. Or a dryer. Or maybe a phone. None of those things need very much maintenance, do they? Shouldn’t a computer just work? When I sit down to the computer, it should work. It should grant my request to look at the world wide web. It should grant me request to view electronic messages. Shouldn’t it grant my request to play music now? Or how about do some complicated mathematics? (I mean, wasn’t it designed to do that to begin with?) And I’ve heard it can talk to other computers in my house. Why can’t it just do that?

Why can’t it just do that? Why can’t it just work? It’s supposed to work.