A Neo-Luddite Manifesto

Posted by Jeff

I have a clear policy: I never blame myself; I always blame the geeks.
The most annoying are the ones who come to help you out of some fix that
you have gotten yourself into (I mean, that their previous incompetence
has gotten you into), and they say, “Oh, this is simple. You just hit
function f8, which opens the gizmo control panel, then you double right
click, which brings up the font reservoir corrector, which you have to
calibrate between 147 and 183 pixels, unless of course you’re running
Windows 2000, in which case you calibrate between 187 and 212 pixels,
and then you just reboot the calibrator (but not the whole
computer–that will wipe out all the fix you have done so far). I
really don’t understand why you even called me; this is all explained
clearly in the ‘help’ feature. Don’t you know how to use that?” There
is never a manual; I can never remember the machinations the techie went
through to fix anything; I have never in my life even found the problem
I want fixed through the “help” function, let alone received any help
with respect to it.

I do still have nostalgia for my IBM Selectric, but I was a convert to
word processing when I worked for UPI in 1977-78 and they had a
rudimentary word processor before they were available to the public.
You could move paragraphs around and stuff. I thought that was
miraculous.

My only complaint about word processing now is all the stupid automatic
help that Microsoft keeps building into new versions of Word. These
features constantly interfere with my production of any document where I
want to indent anything or do anything that suggests I might be doing an
outline, etc. I have never, ever been helped by one of these automatic
features. And they are very complicated to turn off. There is no
single switch and no instructions about where to find all the option
menus. I guess spell check is a nice feature, but I never use it
because it ends up getting turned off when I turn off all the other
automatic help features.

And I hate the automatic scoring screens at bowling alleys that all work
differently in every new bowling alley and are hard to figure out and
are always deleting a bowler or attributing a ball to the wrong bowler
or wiping out your first game scores when you start your second game,
etc., etc. I LIKED keeping score manually; now they don’t even let you
do that. And what is with those stupid bumpers that they put up in the
gutters so that little kids never have to confront failure (or
meaningful feedback since the bumpers make terrible shots into wonderful
shots on a more or less random basis). The last time I went bowling,
there was new gizmo that looked kind of like a portable ball return. It
was a metal frame that little kids can just but the ball on the top of
and push it down the slide. So all they have to do is aim the apparatus
instead of learning how to swing their arms and throw the ball
themselves. No child is ever going to learn how to bowl for real ever
again, and none will ever understand how the scoring system works
either.

And what’s with Americans and golf equipment? Every season the golf
manufacturers invent balls that go farther and clubs (at $400 a pop)
that hit the ball farther and are so forgiving that it is less and less
possible to make a mistake. In the end, what’s the point? And if you
don’t at least sort of keep up, you end up on the golf course with some
moron who barely knows the rules of golf (forget the etiquette
altogether) but can muscle drives 300 yards and make you feel like a
90-pound weakling getting sand kicked in his face. We seem to have
decided that the development of actual skill is a really annoying
requirement for playing serious games.

I watched a bunch of the College Baseball World Series this year (Oregon
State won the national championship, which was a very big deal around
here). I wanted to throw up every time I heard the “ping” sound of the
aluminum bats. No one knows who has real hitting power anymore until
they hit professional baseball because anyone can hit a homerun with an
aluminum bat. The things are even dangerous; they are getting more and
more injuries in Little League and American Legion of pitchers and third
basemen who are getting nailed with ferocious line drives off these
stupid aluminum bats! How much do bats cost, for Christ’s sake? It’s
really hard for little kids to break a bat, and there’s something so
satisfying about the feel of a wooden bat and the feel of a ball well
hit by one. I suppose next they will put magnets in the balls and in
the mitts so that kids won’t make so many errors in the field. Or they
will put big nets in front of all the beginning baseball players so that
they don’t have to actually catch the ball when it is hit to them but
only take it out of the net in front of them and throw it into the net
in front of the first baseman. Hey, this is really a good idea! I bet
I could get rich with this! Anybody know how to patent stuff?

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