I've done another ranty column for The Guardian's technology section. This one moaning about waiting, waiting, waiting for my laptop to catch up with me all day, every day.
Technobile
I'm a whizz at multitasking, but I still get nowhere because my computer can't keep up with me
Kieren McCarthy
Thursday January 5, 2006
The Guardian
If computers are so fantastic, so amazingly smart and clever, how come I'm so much faster at doing things?
Like your fat friend at school, computers lag behind, slowing you up. You want to check your email while writing a letter. So you click on the email program. “Hang on,” pants the overweight jumble of chips, “I'll be there in a sec.”
You wait a bit, give up and decide to get on with writing the letter. Blimey! it wheezes, give us a second, I haven't even got to the inbox yet. Never mind. But get half a sentence in, and there, it throws up the email program, blocking your way. If you're unlucky enough to be holding down the shift or control key at the time, suddenly you've given it some command and off it shoots doing God knows what.
“Oh, sorry about that. Didn't realise you had [wheeze, splutter] moved back to the, er …”
Yes, thank you. Can't you try to please be a little quicker?
Even if you give your computer extra Ram, perhaps even splash out on a new, faster hard drive, the same thing eventually happens. Sure, it's delightful for a few weeks. But that's just because of the difference. Before you know it, it is back to its old ways, stuffing its face with data and painfully keeping up the rear.
In the modern world, we're expected to multitask, so why the hell can't our computers? It's not as if you're asking that much. Its day's work comprises: wake up, open browser, connect to internet. Open word processor. Open email. Then, eight hours later, close them all. Even that, it seems, is too much.
It used to be that I could press the power button, walk to the supermarket, buy some bread, a paper and some milk, and get back just in time for the sweaty mass to ask for my password. These days,with the extra Ram, I have a quick shower and it pretends it's been ready for ages. Within 20 minutes, the pretence is dropped as an unexpected PDF attachment gives it a hernia.
Other times, it just gives up. “Program has encountered an error” it gasps, and collapses on the sofa where you have to do the equivalent of bringing it a cup of tea and promising to go slower in future. Why should I have to be nice to this thing? It's a machine. If the lawnmower cut the grass as badly as my laptop carries out its tasks, it would be in a skip.
Wouldn't it be nice if, just for once, you turned on your PC and it opened the self-same programs you open every single day without you having to go over here and double-click, and go into that menu and click. And scroll to that option and click. And click OK. And click OK …
It's not OK. It's not Cancel either. It's Get Your Arse In Gear Son.
