Chain Smoking Blue Monkey

Tech 1: This one guy was trying to open a 50MB PPT presentation and wanted to know why PPT kept closing on him

Tech 2: Hm. Did it have a bunch of movies and crap in it? Probably it did.

Tech 1: The pics were really high [resolution]

Tech 2: And he used PP to resize them?

Tech 1: I believe so.

Tech 1: and he wanted a RAM upgrade. I was like are you serious? That will not fix the problem.

Tech 2: THAT IS HILARIOUS!

Tech 2: “What do I need to spend to make this problem go away?”

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.

On some days the chain smoking blue monkey is a person. The person that gets you the results you want. The results that you can’t get yourself. We all need those monkeys eventually. Often, it is technology that gets the result. There are those other times when it is a person who knows more about the technology than you do that gets you the result.

There are moments when the “result” is nothing more than recovery. The aftermath of a disaster. Some csbmonkeys respond to disasters.

Something went wrong. Terribly wrong. The csbmonkey is there to survey the aftemath and deliver the news. Bad news. Good news. No news. The facts. The truth.

The csbmonkey becomes comforter, psychologist, and counselor.

The csbmonkey has seen and heard many things. Many disasters. The protestations of innocence in the face of hammer clawed laptops and pitch-perfect baseball style delivery of computer parts to walls, floors and ceilings. The sticky residue of corn syrup sweetened beverages. The smell of dried coffee. Crumbs. Full sized french fries lodged just beyond the visual acuity for those that don’t know where to look. Cracks in glass and plastic. Blood.

We become detectives. Judge. Jury. It is against our nature to execute, of course, although we certainly have a few happy fantasies when our jury delivers the verdict. Guilty. What, again, exactly were the accusations? Ignorance? Lying? Murder? Reckless computing? Entrusting one’s life to a magic box?

All of the above.

Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

The verdict only takes a few minutes to reach. (Usually.) Then the csbmonkey comes through to deliver the bad news or, perhaps, the good news? It might be both. It might be the facts. It might be the truth.

All of the above.

We’ve been found guilty of believing in that which we are unable to distinguish from magic. We believe in it. We believe in the fantasies about it. The fantasies that we were promised and the fantasies we created. What is our sentence? Our punishment? The inability to resurrect on our own. The need for special knowledge. The need for doctors, lawyers, electricians, plumbers, butchers, biologists, engineers, help desk technicians… csbmonkeys all.

We humans like to get things done. We like processes and we like outcomes. Sure, we like chaos and novelty too, but we like all of that in service of the grand scheme we are concoting in our heads about some sort of idealized outcome. The outcome is basically a fantasy we have about what the future is going to be like. These fantasies come in all sorts of sizes. We are familiar with the big ones like “have a career in that thing I like… I think” and “find a cute person to mate with” and “god, if I don’t quit this job soon…” and the more ambitious “…and rule the world! MUAHAHAHAHA!”

It turns out that many outcome fantasies are smaller than these. They are not big fantasies at all. They get assigned smaller names than fantasies. They are “tasks” or “to do items” or “that shit I have to get done by the end of the week.”

How we get to the idealized outcomes, achieve those fantasies, seems important to us, although it may not be very important at all. It may seem important in the midst of attempting to achieve that outcome. Increasingly what helps us achieve these fantasies, these tasks and to do lists, are systems for managing the information. What we use to manage our information are computers. Because of that, computers (and all its far flung family of information processing and management devices) seem important.

What we really want out computers and their relatives is to help us turn our fantasies into reality. Comptuers aren’t important. The freaky information wrangly family is not important. Achieving the fantasy is important.

All of the importance we place on technology in our daily lives may be very misplaced and miscalculated (but not entirely and not always) . What we really care about are the outcomes that technology helps us achieve. We often act like we care about the technology itself, but ultimately we care about achieving something else altogether. If something else could do the same job as a computer, or a telephone, or a PDA, or a pencil, we would use it. If a chain smoking blue monkey could do the same thing a computer does, and do it slightly better, people would start using the monkey.