Do Computers Hate Me?

Maybe

The fourth time the disembodied phone-tree voice said “Please give me the phone number on the account” and I answered, she said “You seem to be having trouble. Good-bye.” The ensuing dial tone caused me to swear.

“Again?” My wife poked her head into my office.

“Yes, arrrgh” (I’ll spare you the rest of my response.)

“That happens to you a lot.”

It does. Phone trees don’t hear or accept my responses. Websites freeze. When I do get a customer service rep or technician on the phone I frequently hear “I’m sorry. Our system is being really slow today,” or “Sorry my screen just went blank, bear with me while I reboot.”

This happens to me when I call to make airline or hotel or restaurant reservations. It happens when I buy tickets on the phone or online, move money around, and even on some charity websites when I make donations.

“Oh that happens to all of us,” my wife said recently. I asked her how often she encounters these glitches with her computer, or with those of service personnel. “Maybe ten percent of the time, maybe less.”

I think I’m closer to forty percent of the time. I’ve even adopted a funny line to say when technology bites me, “Computers save us time, right?” It always gets a laugh.

History of my dysfunctional relationship with computers

My mother became a computer programmer in 1956.

I’ll stop for a moment and let that sink in.

My mother was a math whiz who started programming computers when a computer was three floors of an old shoe factory filled with vacuum tubes. That was before circuits were printed on silicon chips, when “bugs” in the program were likely to be a cockroach that crawled across a tube connection somewhere in the warehouse.

That computer had less computing power than your iPhone and made calculations for the space program.

So I’ve been around computers for a while, and it hasn’t always been a friendly relationship.

In 1970, at one of my first jobs they used an IBM 360, a washing-machine-sized white minicomputer. (My mother was on the team which programmed the 360 operating system.) The marketing manager called this computer Sally, and used it to maintain the mailing lists and send direct mail marketing.

One day I came into the computer room looking for Steve and Sally shut down. A day later, I went looking for Steve. I found him in the computer room looking at me nervously. I had a cup of coffee in my hand which I proceeded to set down on Sally’s white desk height flat surface.

“DON”T. . .”  screamed Steve whereupon I jumped and spilled coffee on Sally. The computer reacted by shutting down.

Afterwards a sign appeared on the computer room door in bright red letters:

“ ALAN CULLER IS NOT ALLOWED IN THIS ROOM”

In business school, I learned to program Basic. I started out doing my assignments on the shared keyboard during normal business hours like everyone else, but I was so slow and the mainframe seemed to crash so much when I was around that I was given a 10:00 p.m. slot. One night, I finally finished my assignment at around 1:00 a.m. (Technically the computer operator finished it for me because he reached the point where he wouldn’t let me touch the keyboard.)

I biked home and collapsed into bed. I had just fallen into a deep sleep when my wife shook me. “It’s time.” Our third child was arriving. I mumbled “Try to go back to sleep,”  not my finest moment, I admit, but I still wonder about the reach of a computer’s antipathy.

In the 80s desktops came out and I’d become a full-on technophobe. People didn’t want in their offices because computers mysteriously crashed when I was around. I couldn’t make my email work and people in the next office would start yelling at me because I didn’t respond. I got cranky and said “We sit twelve steps apart, why are you sending me email!”

I eventually learned to work a computer, became pretty proficient on Word, and PowerPoint and marginally competent on Excel. However, I remain a late adopter on most technology and often when I bump the dishwasher, or washing machine or do something with the TV remote, I hear my wife say what I’ve heard tech people say for forty years:

“ALAN! What the hell did you do?”

The latest battle in the war

Computer and other technical problems do seem to come in cycles with me. In the 70s on WBCN’s morning radio show there was an astrology reporter, Daryl Martini, the “cosmic muffin” (I know, but it was the 70s,). Daryl said that when “Mercury was retrograde” or the “Moon was void of course” to expect technical problems. I haven’t checked my periods of computer hell against the stars, but I had another “hate-wave” recently.

My emails took days to arrive. This was especially true for anyone I sent to who was on, Verizon, aol or yahoo. Several of My ISP’s servers were blacklisted and tech service recommended that I sign-up for Google workspace and point my email address through there. I reluctantly agreed.

Five days later, I still had no email and tech people at my hosting service and Google had no idea why it wasn’t working. I was online chatting with Google and on the phone with technical service at my host going back and forth. Both threw their hands up for the weekend. On Monday I got a phone call from a woman at Google in India who ultimately solved the problem, but only after wiping out my entire email history.

My email works now, but I spent several days texting and emailing to rebuild email addresses and retrieving unused gift cards. I’m still not getting the New York Times and several email newsletters.

Then it was all over or so I thought. I called the host for this blog with the result described above “You seem to be having trouble. Good-bye.” My financial planner said, “Oh wait, our system seems to have locked up. Tell me how things are going with you while I try to get this working.”

“Computers save us time, right?”

“Oh that’s a good one.”

In frustration, I decided to go to CVS to pick up some over-the-counter meds and birthday cards. I decided it might be safer to pay in cash. Then the little screen asked me a question about a receipt and I mindlessly clicked the green button for an email receipt.

The little screen went blank. The clerk’s screen went blank. The screen of the clerk next to him went blank too. Neither could get it running and the woman went off franticly looking for the manager. Moments later she hadn’t returned, but a manager with a nametag Ciro arrived.

“Vincent! What did you do?!” he stage-whispered to my guy.

“I didn’t do anything. He just pushed the email receipt button.”

I waited patiently, while they shut the whole store’s system down and brought it back up. In fact a growing line of customers from all the store’s registers waited patiently while Ciro and Vincent rebooted and all the pharmacy clerks reentered the sales they were working on.

Vincent didn’t ask; he just gave me a paper receipt.

I thought it impolitic to give my usual joke, “Computers save us time, right?”

I also didn’t say, “My fault. Computers hate me.” But I think they do.