The possibilities that are opened to us by owning a computer have always been a fascination for me. But personally I am a bit wary of the false promise that computers will somehow make me more efficient or more intelligent.
I have never really been able to understand computers. Not really—not the insides.
Either you find a way to make the computer work or you learn to adjust. Last week I learned to adjust to having no sound on my PC for four days (nobody promised that this adjustment period would be short or painless) because I’d deleted something called the drivers.
The idea that a computer might be useful in organizing my life is simply a bald-faced lie.
Believe me, I’ve tried. I plug in all my data and get things working pretty good for a few days, or maybe a week and whammo!—it’s time to learn to adjust again.
Maybe a file gets corrupted or deleted or it was saved three years ago in a file format that your current computer can’t read.
Or you might well discover you are spending so much time organizing your life on your computer that you have got no time to actually live it anymore. So you learn to adjust.
Computers keep changing: that’s another problem. You can’t just learn once and then take off the training wheels. Every five years or so old age and redundancy (the computer, not you) mandate the purchase of a new computer and then you have to learn everything all over again. You learn to adjust.
Storing data is no problem at all these days. The problem is remembering where you put it. It might be on any of three or four “devices” you have hanging around the house or, with this new fangled thing called The Cloud, your files could be stored almost anyplace out there in cyberspace.
I did get very, very lucky the other day when I was looking for my to-do list. It’s named “HOT – Daily to-do list”. They say it’s good to sit-down with yourself in the morning and go over your list of things you are going to accomplish that day.
Unfortunately I’d lost track of this list a while back and, the fact was, I hadn’t gotten too much done for the past week or so because I was never really sure what I was supposed to be doing.
I opened the file with great eagerness to find only two things on my old list. The first was clean the house and the second was to generate a to-do list.
It’s not like I needed a computer to tell me that!