Computer Rage...Damn Technology

Came across an interesting article in the Washington Post the other day titled, Repair Teams Try to Calm Computer Rage. It was very interesting and pointed out how people that used to be counselors are now manning help desks being empathetically and soothing to their customers. But it made me think of all those devices and programs that try to be "smart" and usually do the wrong thing. That is maddening!

We have this "smart" copy machine at work that detects the size of the piece of paper and picks the source bin for the paper. So if you are copying a large piece of paper it uses the large size paper, like legal size as opposed to the usual letter size. I needed to copy some small pieces of paper, receipts I think, so I put one down, moved it over to the side but still on the glass, and voila I had LARGE pieces of paper coming out....Annoying. I'm happy to just pick the source bin myself since that's a simple process. I don't need this kind of "intelligence".

Microsoft Word manages to do oodles of "smart" things that are wrong sooooooo much. Ever try to type a word at the beginning of a line and have Word magically "decide" to capitalize it...even when you didn't want it capitalized? OR ever try to get numbering to work correctly. Hit the return and it goes back to 1 when you want it to continue or visa versa. Of course these things can all be fixed but there are a maddening number of menus to go through.

Then there is of course the famous user interface conundrum for Windows that forces you to click on the START button to get to the dialog to shut it down!

The Mac is not immune to such nonsense (although it is now fixed) for years you had to drag a floppy to the trash can to eject, NOT to erase...oy!

Of course we'd all like a DWIM (Do What I Mean) mode but that seems to be a few years off.