The csbmonkey’s jobs are many. Fix. Prevent. Crush. Kill. Destroy. Save. Console.
And noticing.
Noticing things that the regular monkeys are noticing but don’t have the language or facilities to express except with a grunt here or a screech there. And noticing things that the other chain smoking monkeys don’t notice either. Things that that other chain smoking monkeys think the regular monkeys are grunting and screeching abou.t
This is one of the days when the csbmonkey realizes that he is indeed a caged monkey. One of those days when looking over at that other shiny cage is a realization that a shiny new cage is still a cage. A day of caged recognition. That to keep doing the non-monkey things in life one has to subject to being the monkey for a large portion of life. It is not a good day for csbmonkeydom at all.
Soon you don’t even really bother picking at the lock of the cage anymore, since you realize that the small cage just happens to be sitting in a larger cage. You can’t escape your monkeydom that easily. Swinging from cage to cage is not swinging from tree to tree.
The csbmonkey is linked in spirit to his automaton cousins. He does this thing because other people are doing a thing because someone wants a thing. Whirrrrrr…
When do I stop doing this?
Starting is easy. Stopping is not. Starting an addiction is as easy as having a bad day and needing something to help forget it. The new thing. The thing to make life easier. After all, there’s a need for that new thing. Something to forget that lousy day? Something to make life easier? There are times, in fact, that something new and novel is necessary.
The old stuff isn’t working anymore. The rolodex is stained beyond legibility. The day calendar is covered in beer, coffee, whiskey and cigarette stains. Some of the months are analogous to your memory in that they are missing. Torn out. Tossed aside in a fit of frustrated inability to write down what should have happened instead of what did happen. Or worse… writing down appointments you actually did keep as opposed to the ones that you planned to keep, and they all had to do with putting out that fire your friend started and then cleaning up the aftermath instead of building that dream cottage on the beach with a place for a fridge full of beer and margaritas.
The journal is a wire bound high school ruled notebook written in with number 2 pencil, a pen found on the sidewalk, and sometimes something that may or may not be blood (but for certain isn’t graphite or ink). This is where the best thoughts of the day end up? In the same place some kid is dashing out heartfelt poems and doodling bleeding hearts?
This stuff is a MESS! Piles of stained paper. Paper. Good technology. Tried and true. Textural in nature. Smells. Feels. Cam be held. Exist. Good stuff. Messy stuff. It’s a MESS! Needs a place to BE. Needs a place to stay. Needs physical space. Collects dust. Oh paper, how much love there is for you, yet how much hate.
Paper isn’t going to end here, though. Paper is just going to start being a part of something new. Something more. Something with more demanding needs, but something with a mighty high payoff. Paper and the computer are going to be pals. Like the good old days. Like the 80s when paper held computer’s hand and led computer into a strange, scary forest of new creatures and new people. New people that liked computer A LOT. A little too much. People that liked to hang out with computer so much that paper wondered how those years passed so quick and so many drunken nights happened until one morning paper woke up alone ten years behind computer with no retirement plan. Paper got dumped.
This story isn’t about paper, though. This story is about how, exactly, to make a decision. How to decide on when it’s finally time to start looking for that technology to solve that problem. This Palm Pilot was good enough then. Why isn’t it good enough now? This Blue iMac was good enough then. Why isn’t it good enough now? All manner of things once were good enough and mysteriously, now, they aren’t. The Palm Pilot evokes wide eyes and provokes the same reaction as a slide rule or abacus. The Blue iMac is remembered in a “I had one of those!” moments. But… but… but… it all still works! What’s happening? Why can’t it still work?
Because it all moves as fast as what it moves. And it moves data. Data moves fast now. Very, very fast. Accelerating along with the unstoppable tide of time and human desire. SCORCHING ahead. Burning. Causing the hand to pull back in pain. The head spins dizzily and this thing start to feel heavy and slow. And worse. It feels worse. It won’t stay on long. It’s big. It’s got that… color. It’s beige. Or gray. Or blue. But is that a reason to just toss it aside? Oh yes, yes, yes it is. It isn’t the only reason. It isn’t keeping up. With thinking. With viewing. With adapting. Those other things that aren’t so set in stone, they are.
What is next? There has to be something next. The next thing to try that works. That, for a little while, will serve a purpose. No! Serve THE purpose! The purpose to keep up with it all. The purpose to profit. The purpose to take those damn ideas and keep them. NO! Not keep them. Cultivate them. Make them grow. Make them into things that themselves have purpose.
What is here isn’t working. The deck needs shuffled. A new card has to be pulled from the deck.
Next time, I’m going to pull a new card from the deck.
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.
This photo was found at the Chicago Tribue with the following text:
Taking up the habit
An unidentified Chinese woman holds her pet monkey who had taken up smoking in Fuzhou, southeast China’s Fujian province, Thursday. The death toll from diseases associated with tobacco is about one million Chinese annually, a figure that is expected to increase to 2.2 million per year by 2020 if smoking rates remain unchanged, according to the World Health Organization.
(AFP/Getty Images photos)
Jun 1, 2007
No word given on the current smoking statistics for monkeys. Note, this monkey is NOT blue and therefore may not be able to provide you with appropriate levels of desktop computing technical support. However, the chain around the neck indicates that the monkey may be employed in the field anyway.
This is not about technology. This is about people. Two people that stood behind me and said of a fun idea “But it’s really stupid.”
I’m here to tell you, folks, the idea was useless, but it was not stupid. I suppose, to old men, which they were, and by old I mean they were perhaps 10 years older than me (any many pounds heavier… wait, is that prejudice? Yes? Damn. Ok, they were fat old men. How’s that?). What was this stupid thing? It was something called Hullabaloo. It was essentially interactive technological art. Useless it was. Interesting it was. Fun it was. Stupid? That wasn’t my first thought. The technology was simple, but the idea behind was quite sophisticated and without the explanation on hand for it, difficult to discern without knowledge and participation and thought. The idea tapped into a fundamental human desire: uniqueness.
You can read about what Hullabaloo does on the page, and see it there, but I will briefly describe it. It is a box with a receive inside it (a phone, I believe) with two plastic wiring conduits running out of it. One goes to an AC power outlet. The other stretches upward to a speaker. Inside the box the bluetooth receiver is connected to another device that generates a unique audio signature similar to a birdcall based on your bluetooth ID (you have to discover the device and join to it briefly). When you wander back by, it knows who you are and plays your unique call.
I am not sure why the gentlemen, sorry, the old fat white guys, thought it was stupid. It was thoughtful and new. It was a concept that someone thought would fun and then they did it. Indeed, much that one person finds fun others find boring, or even stupid. I could not help but think of another story.
There seems to be a tradition going on. The tradition is that technology provides us with amazing wonders and contemptible tragedies. The tradition of useful, clever, smart inventions that have great use… great practical use. And the tradition of technology that results in ruin, destitution, and nothing worthwhile. Those are the blacks and whites of technology. The two sides. The lustrous and wonderful blacks and the blinding and sterile whites.
Oh dear sir, the grays. The in between things. The… stupid technologies. Of what use are these technologies? Certainly they will remain as they are. They will remain stupid. It almost goes without saying that they are useless technologies. Useful technologies are NEVER stupid! Not the steam engine. Not the roller washing machine! These are practical, useful technologies that I am sure will never be surpassed or thought of as stupid. Certainly not thought of as stupid at the time they were invented. I for one am enjoying our era of steam engine airplanes and computer controller roller washing machines that I must stand next to and attend.
The Hullabaloo has no use beyond it’s novelty. Except to light up the minds of simple minded folks like myself. Smart, sophisticated fat white guys know better. They know it’s stupid. A useless contrivance. Like so, so many other technologies.
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.
There is something about technology in general that gets under our skin. Creeps under there and makes us itch. We feel like we need to scratch that itch. It turns out that we don’t like things under our skin except what belongs there. We don’t like having things inserted under the skin. Through work and happenstance, though, we are getting technology pushed underneath the skin every day.
When I look at my own skin, though, I don’t see anything. Nothing is crawling out from underneath my flesh, but every day something is getting pushed underneath there. Let’s just shoot to the honesty here. I am sitting at my various desks pushing things underneath there… every… day. I am looking for things every day to put in there. I am little better than an addict looking for the newest novel drug. No better than the pop culture whore looking for the next new band, the next new style, the next new fad. I am desperately looking for something to make my brain light up! To make the rest of my life just a little easier. Just a tad easier. Isn’t that what I am searching for? Making my life easier? Isn’t that the point? Why else would I be in this desperate situation? It isn’t my human nature to make things more difficult for myself. Is it?
Look. See, there’s nothing under there at all. I’m clean. I don’t touch the stuff. Not me. Wait, what’s this? A new way to connect. See, look, here’s what it’s really about. Isn’t it? I can communicate! Talk! Chat! With others! They are people, after all. Surely you don’t think that I’m just addicted to the thing that let’s me communicate with them, do you? God almighty, no, that is NOT the issue. I am not an addict. Look, I am clean. I don’t even SMS. No much. Not unnecessarily. Unless I need it.
All of this is just, you know, to help me get through the day. If I had allergies I would take allergy medication. This is no different. I have a problem. I am not organized. I am not connected. I must respond. My sickness is all around me and everyone has it. Failure. This little thing, this pill, this keypad, will help me. This is it. The magic pill is here and I am beginning to feel healed. The symptoms are fading away. Here are the answers! The responding to everyone! A CALENDAR FOR ME!? It. Is. Wonderful.
I was at the edge of the abyss. I was disorganized. I was behind. I was failing. I was a failure. My life was fail. No more. I have inserted the appropriate suppository. I have swallowed the correct pill. I have injected the right drug. I have sniffed the right powder. FRIENDS… I HAVE FOUND SALVATION! Task it! To do it! Wireless it! Salvation can only be found in connectivity. This is the apex of our realization as humanity.
There is no dark side to this.
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.
While my goal is to post one sort of long, thoughtful post a week, there are certainly going to be instances of just brief observations from my workplace, like this one today.
I suspect that every workplace has a manager or upper level administrative staff person that is a technological fantasist. Someone that is very busy all the time doing their job, yet always feeling overwhelmed and under-organized. I call them technological fantasist because they see or hear about new technology in their peripheral senses but are unable to devote any time to actually researching that technology and all of its good and bad points. Nevertheless, they know about it and have heard rumors about it and have already started constructing fantasies about it. The main fantasy is about how finally, FINALLY this time, this technology is going to do it. This technology is going to work perfectly. This technology is going to get their time and their entire body of disorganized work fully organized and flowing smoothly like glass. The exchange might go a little something like this.
Client: “Yeah, right, but I’ve heard about this monkey that can do this a little better. I’m interested in that.”
Technician: “You do know that the monkey chain smokes, right?”
Client: “Oh really? I’m sure they’ll work that out in an upgrade.”
Technician: “The product is CALLED ‘chain smoking blue monkey’. It’s in the name.”