The secret of a successful relationship with computers is to remember that they go better with drugs. Alcohol and computers don't mix at all: a loss of impulse control is the last thing you need when fiddling with software. But the kind of rambling, repetitive, tireless exploration of the obvious that conversations on dope turn into is exactly the mode of thought which you need to succeed with computers.
I was put in mind of this by two things last week. The first was when a moment of uncontrolled impulse caused me to press the "y" key while I was installing a new hard disk, and thus set in train a chain of events which led me, 24 hours later, to wipe out the whole disk and then painstakingly reinstall every single sodding program that I own. The second was the discovery of the home page of a man who describes himself as Team Leader of a Technical Support team: he gives the name of his employer, a medium-sized Internet provider based in London, but I see no reason to pass it on, though it is one which for a while ran one of the official websites of the Church of England. Here is how he relaxes.
"In my spare time I just chill out. Smoke a couple of joints. Relax. Sleep. Sleeping is best when you're stoned. Your whole mind opens up, and lets out all that stress. Then comes my fun part. I enjoy night-clubbing, the pub (very handy when you need to spend some of that hard-earned cash!) and generally any place that you can smoke cannabis.
"I do not promote the use of drugs, but I do use them myself. That does not mean I am a junkie. I just enjoy a bit of puff now and then. And when I go night-clubbing, I take a bit of speed, maybe some Es, or a small piece of LSD. You only live once so I am living it to the extent. To the extent of what you might ask? I don't know because I haven't got there yet. I will let you know when I do."
The stuff has obviously done wonders for his coherence and philosophical depth. But I doubt it has made his tech support worse. The whole point is that you don't need to be smart to do his job. In fact the sheer tooth-grinding boredom of any kind of low-level understanding of computers is so immense that all the people I know who really grasp what magic is worked by the box in front of them have cured most of their synapses to a delicate shade of hash brown. As a middle-aged old fart myself, who can't smoke without getting panic attacks, the obvious way to come to terms with my futility in front of computers is to come over all artistic, and console myself that I am too intelligent to understand the things I write about. But somehow that feels like cheating.
And maybe the problem is not to do with computers at all, but is a general fact of mechanised life. So many of the things we do to earn a living require that most of our faculties be throttled back to a quiescent state. Driving to work is every bit as boring as reading the headlines on screen every day, except that crashes are usually a little harder to recover from. What is laughably called surfing the web consists almost entirely of waiting for pointless graphics to appear on screen and inform you that you are lost or mistaken, but by the time they appear you have forgotten what it was you wanted in the first place. Television itself is simply marijuana without the chemicals.
Even apparently normal activities like talking on the telephone are actually unendurable if you do nothing else at the same time. Alexander Chancellor, when he was editor of the Spectator, used to make calls pacing around his desk tethered by the cord of the telephone which he held in one hand while the other was stoking his cigarette habit: even that, I think, was healthier than hunching the phone into my ear with one shoulder and playing solitaire on screen with my spare hand. Admittedly this keeps my brain occupied, but it's given me a spine like a corkscrew. I should relax, maybe; chill out or something.
