Sunday, August 30, 2015
Don’t shoot the messenger
I think it’s pretty safe to say that over the last 35 years the rapid advances in computer technology have revolutionized the way we live, and I don’t think that most Americans can imagine going back to the pre-digital days of the late 1970s and early ’80s.
I mean, how the hell did we manage to live with only four major television networks, telephones tethered to walls that could only make and receive voice calls and personal computers that for the most part not only couldn’t talk to each other, but required you to master a bizarre and arcane language known as DOS to get them to do anything useful?
Yet only a few short decades later, the things we used to think of as impossible are now so commonplace that it’s hard to remember a time when our collective knowledge wasn’t literally at our fingertips.
For the most part this technological revolution has been a good thing. It has allowed ordinary people to organize and raise money for worthy causes or start businesses in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before (Kickstarter.com); given an outlet to millions of aspiring filmmakers (YouTube), authors (via e-books or on blog sites like this one), artists (Deviantart.com) and musicians (iTunes) who otherwise would never have found a way to share their work with such a huge audience; and made finding information on even the most obscure topic almost as simple as asking a question (Google).
But I fear the instant gratification our new tech has brought us has come with a downside; it’s made us impatient and perhaps a bit self-centered.
As our gadgets have become faster and faster at serving up what we want, we’ve become less and less able to appreciate the millions of tiny things that have to happen in the background to get them to work. We’ve come to expect that our creations will be perfect and function properly all the time and when they don’t, we become easily irritated at it or any humans who fail to live up to our “I want it now” expectations.
Maybe the world has always been this way and I am only seeing it now that I am getting older and perhaps a bit more cynical in my “old age.”
So it’s almost poetic that I noticed this trend the week I turned 50. My wife and I were on a cruise in the Baltic, when the brand new ship we were on lost one of its engines because of a technical glitch with one of its cutting edge power systems. We limped into port on the remaining engine without incident and aside from having to spend most of the rest of our vacation stuck in Tallinn, Estonia, everything else aboard our floating luxury hotel was perfectly operational.
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Our cruise ship, the MS Viking Star, in port in Helsini, Finland
a few days before one of her engines failed. It was using the
latest high-tech power system and despite the crew's best
efforts to fix it, they couldn't.
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Now I can definitely understand my fellow passengers’ disappointment when the captain announced the cancellation of the rest of our trip after several failed attempts to repair the engine. My wife and I were also terribly disappointed that we were going to miss six of our 10 ports of call.
But listening to some people carrying on like it was the end of the world, hearing their unreasonable expectations and watching them verbally abuse the crew and staff who were obviously bending over backwards and doing their best to try to help us just made me want to scream.
I’ve been in similar situations at my job where a critical server has crashed, so I understood exactly what steps the engineering staff was taking to solve the problem and could emphasize with the kind of pressure they were under. So when some of my fellow passengers began vociferously telling anyone who’d listen how the ships’ crew and/or cruise line were incompetent, it became gallingly obvious that none of them knew the first thing about technology or how to troubleshoot it.
At one point one I even heard one of these “know-it-alls” say that the ship should have been carrying a extra engine incase something like this happens. It took all my self control not to march up to that person ask “Oh really? And do you carry an extra engine in the trunk of your car, in case the one under the hood breaks?”
Sigh.
Now being Jewish, I understand a lot about complaining. My people have raised it to an art form and even coined a name for it – kvetching – and if all some of my fellow passengers had been doing was kvetching, it wouldn’t have bothered me, nor would I probably have noticed.
Only when they got indignant and started blaming the crew for things which they had no control over, did I really realize just how much our ubiquitous technology has made us so impatient.
I don’t think people really have any idea of just how complex all our gadgets have made our lives these days. Sure those slick little boxes with their touch screens and pretty graphics look cool, but does anyone in the general public really understand how they work?
Most people don’t care as long as they do.
But therein lies the problem.
Sometimes the technology behind these gadgets fails and the reason for that failure isn’t as obvious as it used to be.
In the days gone by, if something broke, it was pretty obvious what part had failed, and the average person with some basic tools could fix most things pretty quickly.
But let’s face it, the days of the shade-tree mechanic are all but gone. Today you practically need a degree in electrical engineering and a computer just to retrieve the error codes from your car.
And things are only bound to get more complex from here on out. With computers designing more and more of our devices with little or no human input, it’s going to take us even more time to figure out a problem as first we’ll need to understand how the computers put the devices together before we can even start figuring out what went wrong. This, I suspect, is what happened aboard our cruise ship and explains why it took so long to fix.
Now I’m by no means suggesting that everyone needs to get a degree in engineering or computer science and start troubleshooting their own devices. (If they did, I’d be out of a job!) All I’m asking is for people to remember that our technology isn’t perfect nor are the people who design and keep it running.
Sometimes things break and sometimes my colleagues and I don’t immediately understand why it broke or how to fix it.
Yelling at us or constantly reminding us how you are being inconvenience by the problem doesn’t help us fix it any faster. Believe me when I tell you we don’t like having to work long into the night or through our weekends fixing a problem. We do our best to get everyone up and running as soon as possible so both you and we can get back to our every day lives.
Try and remember how you feel every time you upgrade your smart phone and struggle with all the new features just to get your e-mail and apps working again. Seems to take you forever, right?
Now imagine having to do that for billions of people on hundreds of different models of smart phones and you’ll have an inkling of what IT folks are up against each day.
So next time you have a tech-related problem, cut the people trying to fix it a break, take a deep breath and give us some time to figure it out.
Because despite what you’ve been told, not every problem can be fixed by turning it off and on again.
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Great article, Jeff. I think on your cruise, a lot of the frustration may have been because people spent beaucoup bucks for a cruise, and felt the crew wasn't giving them their money's worth. Rober Ballard noted that as part of the reason some of Titanic's lifeboats pulled away half full. The rich folks in first class weren't about to trade their luxury liner for a rowboat, and thought the crew needed to do whatever it took to get the ship to New York, even if they had to carry it on their back. I do think social media is making society collectively dumber, though.
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