About computers

It’s odd how computers have taken over our lives, that is if you think how happily we got along without them until relatively recently. Now they seem to be indispensable and certainly in many walks of life if the computer is down people can’t do anything for you. I like to think life would go on without them, certainly in its most fundamental aspects.

But let’s pause to consider how dependent we’ve become...
First of all, you’re reading this at the computer. Moreover I’m writing this at the computer. In fact, these days, I write most things at the computer. I read my programme for work on the computer. So the first thing I do when I get up on a weekday is to check if there’s been a change to it, and while I’m at it see if there’s anything in my e-mail inbox.
At work all of our administrative tasks have to be done on the computer - leave applications, travel administration, report writing etc.
In my private life, I keep my accounts on the computer. I now make my bank transfers from my computer. I book all my private plane tickets on line and buy many concert even cinema tickets that way too. I store and manage my photographs on the computer. I can listen to music I like while working at the computer and buy tracks off i-Tunes. I can have a video conversation with members of my family on Skype. And so the list goes on. I probably spend more time in front of a computer screen than in front of a TV screen.

Computers started to enter my life at work. Riccardo Ettore, one of the earliest computer-nerds and mac-freaks I know, ran a training session in which he gave us an excellent introduction to how they worked, what they could do and what the future held. It was inspirational and everything was upon us sooner than we expected.
Riccardo himself played a key role in devising the software to write and manage the programme for the interpreters . When I started in the 1980’s we had physically to go into our building at the weekend where the programme was stuck up on the wall on those old long wide print-outs with holes down the side. We had to scan through it all till we found our name and copy down by hand the details of our assignments for the week. As things progressed through the week the office had to correct the metre long paper sheets on a big table with tipp-ex, pencil and a rubber then ring up colleagues individually to inform them of the changes. Needless to say, with the subsequent expansion of the number of languages and colleagues that would never work today. Now we consult our programme on-line or if a computer is not to hand we can ring a number and get a synthesized voice to read it out to us. That’s how much things have changed.

Then at work something called e-mail was made available to us so the administration could send us messages. But then friends everywhere were also starting to have their own e-mail addresses so we used it as much for private as for professional purposes.
I like the way you can leave e-mails for people to answer at their convenience. You can think over a proposal before giving a response, without being put on the spot. That’s definitely positive. I find e-mails particularly great for finalizing practical arrangements before travelling. However, I’ve learned the hard way that e-mails are abused in the sense that although they are meant as spontaneous communication, people keep them and use them later against you. We forget too easily the old adage that it’s always better to think twice before committing anything to writing.

Timidly we were also granted internet access which might be handy for doing some background research and reading for meetings we were working in. But that soon turned out to have many other uses too.
The internet has since become so integrated into our modern Western lives that we take it for granted. It has become the most important thing we use our computers for. Most of the things I do on the computer that I listed at the start of this piece are internet based. Many are very convenient allowing us to do all sorts of things from the comfort of our own desk. The obvious downside of this is firstly that we are now having to do things for ourselves that previously other people did for us, which in some cases may be cheaper but actually takes us longer and has certainly also led to the disppearance of many jobs. The macro-economist will tell you that these people have merely been redeployed to more useful tasks and our overall productivity has increased. At work I know it merely means that I have to spend more of my own time doing things previously done by the administration. Secondly we just don’t get out and about nearly as much as before to “interface” with actual human beings, which must be an impoverishment of our lives.
The internet is potentially a fantastic source of information - if you know where to find it. It’s great to go onto the official site of somewhere you want to visit to check programme details, opening times, how to get there etc. It’s less obvious if you want to find out something and the search engine throws up thousands of possible sources of information whose reliability may be far from clear. Absolutely anybody can have a web page out there: witness this blog. It certainly represents democracy and freedom of expression at work, but without applying a little common sense and scepticism you can easily become the victim of misinformation, disinformation and undesirable influences. I’ve written before that the much vaunted information society often gives people countless little bits of a jigsaw without the bigger picture with which to put them together.
On the whole, however, targeted use rather than mindless surfing of the internet is hugely beneficial.
So what’s in my favourites menu bar ? Work obviously; my bank to manage my account; Metéo Belgique for the weather (and wonderfully web-cam shots so you can actually see what the weather’s doing in the Ardennes before you decide to go); Wikipedia, which is hugely useful, and judging from articles on things I do know about, pretty reliable; BBC for the news and just about everything; die Bahn for train timetables anywhere in Europe; Via Michelin, ditto for road route planning; You Tube for catching those media moments I missed; Ultimate guitar for working out how to play a song; Brussels airport to check timetables and see if a plane I’m meeting someone off is on time; NHS’s A-Z Health; various newspapers in my languages... Yes the possibilities of the internet are infinite.

So to return to my narrative: In short I was starting to be hooked and it seemed like a good idea to have one of these computers things at home too and thus also to make a more formal separation between private and professional use.

So I got my first PC about ten years ago. It was a chunky Packard Bell with a tower and a rather large monitor - that is in terms of the space it took up, not the size of the screen. We invested in a new extra large desk in the office to accomodate it all. It seemed a good idea to introduce the children to all of this young too as it would doubtless loom large in their lives and inevitably they are now more proficient than we are. A significant break-through was the upgrading of internet access from the dial-up connection to broadband which made it feasible to use the internet for many more things..
But the PC aged quickly and I started to lose my patience with the quirkiness and unreliability of Windows. The PC would keep on freezing and crashing on me. Moreover I’d go away for two weeks and come back to find hundreds of junk e-mails in my inbox.
So in 2004, after one crash too many, I decided to change to Mackintosh and bought an eMac. I have never looked back. Notwithstanding some problems with file conversion given Microsoft’s virtual monopoly position, things are generally simpler and more intuitive (just like Riccardo had always said it would be on a Mac). And the machine doesn’t crash on me. Last year as the memory was getting full and things were slowing up I upgraded to an iMac with a delightful large flat screen which is great for looking at photos. So that’s what I’m sitting at now.

Computers are of course great only as long as they work. Few things are more frustrating than being condemned to do something through a system that won’t work for you. I’m not the only one to verbally abuse the computer, but I don’t go so far as hitting it (any more). It’s that feeling you’re dealing with something semi-intelligent when in fact it’s just an inanimate machine that has been badly programmed by a less than competent human being. If they spoke back to us nicely and intelligently like HAL in Kubrick’s “2001”, then we’d never dream of shouting at them. Mind you , remember what HAL finally did: try to dispose of the inconvenient humans who were spoiling his plans and who then had to shut him down - a prophetic movie.
I only get irate at the computers at work, I love my iMac and never feel the need to be rude to it. Partly it’s to do with the less than user-friendly applications we have to navigate at work and partly, I guess, it’s the fact that we share the PCs there. They’re like shared bicycles: nobody looks after them and when you pick one up the tyres are not pumped up, the saddle is at the wrong height and everything a bit clunky and wobbly. They will still go, only you wish you had your own with you.
In the case of the shared PC at work, in a multi-lingual environment, somebody may have changed the keyboard setting so the letters on the keyboard don’t correspond. Yes, I’m one of those sad people who have to look at the keys and I’m used to an AZERTY, living in a French speaking country, so I have a particular dislike for the Germanic/central European QWERTZ layout on which I can never find the “m”. It’s odd really, that inheritance in the computer world of keyboard layouts from the late 19th century.
If truth be told, I’ve actually always liked typewriters so I find the typing part fun (as long as the keys correspond to the characters).

Computers in the end are really toys for boys and it’s nice when they do the things for you that you want them to. I admit to inventing tasks to do, just to fiddle around with the computer. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I write this blog.