Throw 'em in the clink!

Beware of computer prison

                                        by Robert LaFrance

          There has been a certain amount of consternation about last week’s column in which I suggested that anyone who has had a computer for two months and doesn’t yet know how to operate it should have it seized by the byte police. The readers’ reactions have been almost as outraged as the time I killed the mouse with a broom and people wrote in from every hamlet from Kenora, Ont. to Lunenburg, NS.

          (I suppose the question should be: where did the mouse get that broom?)

          I will stand by my recommendation. In fact, compared to one person I know, and I won’t mention his name, I am very lenient, even wimpy. “Execute them!” he roared one day. Another day when he calmed down, he said that the computer non-nerds should go to ‘computer prison’.

          That would be a rather crowded institution. It’s surprising how many people don’t have a clue how to operate the computer they sit down in front of every day. Oh, they can go on Facebook, and they can send email letters back and forth to their cousins, nephews and nieces, but they don’t have a clue how to attach a photo to an email, or how to file a photo they’ve received in an email.

          I blame oat bran.

          In April of 1994, Bill Gates, who was still running Microsoft then, became constipated. His doctor, an Elroy Rasputin of Mount St. Helen, Washington, suggested he take a week off work to recover his aplomb, as it were. The MD recommended to Gates that he eat miles and miles of oat bran every day, and little else except broccoli tea. Mister Gentleman (as my Dad used to say) that cleaned him out. At the end of that week he could run (no choice) from his bed to the outhouse (another Elroy suggestion) in 3.4 seconds.

However, while the cat was away, the computer mice were at play. Bill Gates’s assistant, who carried the unlikely name of Swann Lacche, had been busy. “Let’s make it easy for new computer owners,” he told the programmers. “Let’s make everything automatic so that Mr. And Mrs. Non-Tech don’t have to know about the DOS filing system, don’t have to know any of that technical stuff.”

And that’s just what they did; that was the origin of Windows 95, which has evolved into Windows Vista (a total piece of manure) and today’s Windows 7, which may be Windows 12 by the time this column is printed. Except for people who have to deal with people who have no clue how a computer works, everybody lived happily ever after, especially those who sold and fixed computers.

I bought my first computer in October of 1994 at the suggestion of the then Victoria County Record editor Willie Wark. Until then I had brought in my column typed on an actual piece of paper, and by the time Willie had edited it, someone else had typed it out, and someone else had pasted it in the paper, mistakes happened, which is like saying that a tornado is quite a breeze.

One example was that when I had interviewed a woman who said she had ‘post-partum depression’ it was printed in the paper that she suffered from ‘post-parent digression’. Those who have had the former know it’s no joke, and no one was amused. Guess whom they blamed? So I bought a $4300 computer.

Here’s the part that I am suggesting to today’s computer owners, if they want to avoid computer prison (located in the Regent Mall in Fredericton) or worse, execution. Take a course. From the day I bundled the various parts of my computer upstairs to my office until three months later, I taught myself how to manage computer software. I left hardware to braver souls.

On January 23, 1995, I emerged from my office. I had learned how to operate Windows 3.1 and I had connected to the Internet via telephone dial-up. My wife and children were a little nervous at first, at this now bearded stranger who suddenly emerged to have meals with them, but they got over it, I think.

The main thing was, I knew exactly how the DOS filing system – still used today, but away into the background – worked and I could type my column, then email it to the editor in Perth. However, there was another editor in Woodstock to go through, and he kept changing my correct grammar to incorrect grammar. I would write “between you and me” and he would change that to “between you and I” which, as the late Miss Sara Williams (my high school English teacher) could tell you, is wrong, wrong, WRONG!

Proud as punch at having mastered Windows 3.1, I was less than impressed when Microsoft announced a week later that it was soon coming out with Windows 95. “It will make computers easy to use for everybody!” trumpeted Swann Lacche. He was shot a week later when, coincidentally, I happened to be vacationing in Redmond, Washington.

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