COMMENTARY--
How is it that lumps of silicon can get under our skin so very easily?
I must admit I chuckled when I read a recent story about an American gentleman who took a novel approach to dealing with an IT issue; he shot his roommate's Xbox console. My first thought was "how uniquely American", followed by the thought that but for the relative difficulty in getting hold of firearms in this country, it's a move I might just have undertaken myself at one time or another.
There comes that time when you've just had it with your IT setup; whether it's a rack of servers or a recalcitrant notebook. How you deal with it says a lot about the kind of day you've been having. Several years ago, for example, I had been given the task of writing about one of the first ultracompact laptops to hit the local market. Someone else had done the benchmarking and handed over those results to me, along with the laptop. In a moment of pure genius, however, they'd also formatted the laptop's hard drive. In the configuration we'd been delivered it came without an internal or external optical drive of any kind, and relied on having Windows installed to show off some of its nifty features. It would boot to a DOS prompt, and that was it, and I had to ship it back to the vendor the next day.
Stress rather too rapidly overtook me, until I calmed down, but in those early minutes, it would have been extremely dangerous for the formatting party, or for that matter the notebook, had the chap sitting next to me been testing high explosives or concrete boots. Or both. Thankfully a cooler head prevailed, and I undertook the rather painful process of reinstalling Windows via the use of a manually built autoexec file, a parallel port ZIP drive and a lot of compressed Windows files. This was, of course, painfully slow, and I suspect that's another trigger for people wishing to shoot their precious IT hardware; you get used to things happening at a certain pace, and when it just sits there -- or worse still, freezes up -- your blood begins to slowly boil.
The big IT vendors, both software and hardware, would tell you that this kind of thing is in the past, and then glibly turn around and blame the issue on some kind of third-party application or hardware, whose vendor will then turn it around onto your shoulders, which by now (if my experiences are any guide) will be gently steaming with rage.
What fascinates me is how lumps of silicon and big bunches of numbers can get people (and I'm probably more guilty than most) into such a rage. Sure, everyone's heard of road rage, but at least (not that I'm defending the idea) there's a physical person you can go toe to toe with, either in your head (preferable) or with a cricket bat (not so good, unless you like prison food). In the case of your PC, what are you going to do, not feed the mouse?
What do you think? Why do we allow IT to get under our skin? Got any particular stories to share? Let me know at edit@zdnet.com.au
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