Some thirty years ago there was a popular list of the twenty most significant stresses in life. They included the obvious things like divorce – which I think might have been number one – and moving house which I recall was number two. The death of a family member, a diagnosis of cancer, and giving up smoking or alcohol were probably also there.
Not on the list was what I think is a uniquely modern stress: having one’s computer go bust. It wasn’t on the list thirty years ago because in those days computers didn’t give you high speed access to your bank accounts and investments, to email, to television, to Twitter, to sports, to contact information to all your family and friends, or games any more challenging than Solitaire or Hearts.
A friend just wrote saying that her computer has been down for two days, and that the esperience was less like an amputation than a decapitation. I know what she means.The potential for stress is there as soon as you get a computer, and the more you learn to use it, the bigger the potential stress becomes.
We got our first computer in 1980. Within six weeks, my husband and I realized that we were a two-computer couple. Our relationship might survive a single bed, and if required a single bathroom or a single car, but it was not going to survive a single computer. I quite soon realized that I would trade off my refrigerator, clothes dryer, and television in a single throw rather than face the upheaval of computer loss.
Of course, it’s happened. More than once. The worst was probably in Spain when DOS and all the rest of the software was in Spanish with words that weren’t yet in any published dictionary. Today the sources of the problem are more varied – sometimes it’s a virus, a software glitch, the telephone connection, or the weather.
Whatever the cause, faced with a computer black-out, I’m still inclined to shout from the battlefield with Richard III – ”My kingdom for my horse -for my computer!”
