Watch Your Back, Computers Are Taking Over!

I'm frustrated because I keep hearing people talk about how technology is "taking over" like its some bad thing. Watch out, they'll say, computers will take over our lives! Technology is bad, they'll scream. This computer just hit me! Meanwhile, those of us that are enjoying the computer revolution are screaming, "I just cut your torso off!" I'm speaking of Doom and other related computer games of course.

Without technology and computers, such comments would not be able to be made. For, example, I heard the above comment screamed from one of my university's technologically advanced computer labs. Without computers, we would be forced to use our imagination in order to run down dark hallways and blow people up. And that would just be inefficient and time consuming.

But this ability to cut people's torsos off in cyber space didn't happen overnight. As a matter of fact, I can remember when it all started. The year was 1987. Communism was right around the corner. The nation lived under a cloak of fear and darkness...and Michael Jackson. But then there was light in my 4th grade elementary school. We got computers!

I remember my first day in front of that pearly, brand new Apple computer. The green screen and all four megs of its memory stared back at me, so promising, so enchanting as if to say, "Go ahead, push that red button in the back!" So I did, and thus ended our first day in the computer lab.

But in the fifth grade we got to play with a wonderful little program called Logo. Logo consisted of a little triangle called a turtle (named that because it in no way looked like a turtle). That was it, just a blank screen and a turtle. Basically, you had to tell the turtle what to do by typing in commands. For example, F3 R456 B67 L1213 would make the turtle turn right. F4 R234 B213 would make it back up and so on. But all of this was too confusing for a fourth grader, especially when the screen was whispering about the red button...

My next memorable computer experience didn't come until high-school when the English department got computers due to a generous government grant. So one day, we all walked in to class to find...the same computers from fourth grade. But despite the frugality of my high-school, the typing department got brand new computers with word processing programs. This is what saved my grade in typing. Ah, the miracle of Cut and Paste. Just a few clicks and I was typing 300 words a minute! Isn't technology wonderful?

Because of my cutting and pasting abilities, I thought that I was pretty knowledgeable about computers by the time I got to college. That is until I met a strange breed of people called "Computer Science Majors." You can spot them by their huge finger muscles. Man, they can really cut and paste with authority!

You have to be careful with CompSci majors however. If you let your guard down, you could quite possibly find yourself in a conversation like the one I had the other day.

Me: "Hey Todd, what do you think is wrong with my disk."

Todd: "Do you have the right drivers loaded. Because you'll want to have the proper drivers loaded before you check your boot sectors so you don't accidentally fry your PCI ports. Or do you have Scuzzie ports? If so, make sure you protect your FAT sectors from being over-written."

Me: "Uh...But what about my disk thingee?"

Todd: "110010010111011011010101010101..."

At that point Todd started speaking only in binary code and then he crashed. Don't worry, he'll be okay. Just don't let this happen to you. The key is to not ask them about your computer. Because if they try to fix it and can't find out what is wrong, they won't stop trying. It becomes more than a simple project, it becomes an obsessive challenge. I still have one in my room from last year. He's still hunched over the monitor wispering strange things like, "Now maybe if I just reconfigure the root directory and have it recompile using a...00100101010010." This is a shame, because I really need that computer to do some really important things. Namely, playing Quake.

Bear in mind, however, that while I am thoroughly enjoying this little revolution, my parents have in no way helped me get to this point. Growing up, the most technology that could be found in our house was the dishwasher, and even this boggled my parents' minds.

"Hey, John, help! The dishwasher won't start!"

"Uh, try closing the door first."

This Christmas I tried valiantly to bring my parents up to speed with the modern world. So I bought them a DOS For Dummies book. When they opened my present my mom looked up at me and said, "Do's for dummies? Do what?"

So as I sit here in a multi-million dollar high-tech multi media Pentium pumped computer lab, I can't help to look towards the future. A future full of...well more computers. And these computers don't wish to take over the world. They just wish to help us kill imaginary things in a place that doesn't exist. Is that so bad? So I'd like all of you out there that wish to speak badly of computers to take a moment, sit down and re-examine things. But watch your back, because I just might CUT YOUR TORSO OFF!