poor pc

Yesterday I thought of a PC as a human. That was friggin' scary.

But I should really elaborate. The office was pretty empty with half the team gone either for holiday or illness. The 2 outspoken guys on the team were spared. Both were having issues with their PCs and as the day progressed, they complained and cursed, increasingly loudly, and with more frequency. And so I felt sorry for the little boxes under our desks. I mean, if we're not running 5 applications simultaneously, we're inserting multiple devices into the thing and expecting it to work. And when it freezes, or there is a long pause (and long amongst us these days seems to be 5 seconds), we scream, curse, or bitch.

And then, an image of a person in a hospital, tubes strewn about and transfusions galore, flashes in my mind. I mean, how easily do our bodies reject organs and blood, despite theoretically perfect matches? How would you feel if you were poked and prodded, tubes up the ass and down the throat, all sorts of liquids and organisms injected or attached to you? And yet we expect so much of an inanimate box made of plastic, silicone, and metal.

Yeah, I grant that it's weird to humanise a PC, to translate its existence into an imaginable human life. But the daydream 1) illustrated my altered state in working life and 2) heightened my appreciation for this thing I'm typing on. Or maybe I was just amazed at how worked up people can get over their computer's. It would be interesting to study the link between stress/heart attacks and the increasing dependency on PCs. But I digress.