Robert Switzer

There are people out there who actually expect the world to function to their convenience. I discovered this soon after I started paying the bills doing PC support fifteen or sixteen years ago. I was dumbstruck by it.

My experience had been, well, different than that. I grew up adjusting to things that didn’t work to my convenience. Having to flex around weird, ungainly, unexpected and maybe dangerous situations. Making do with things that maybe worked once and still worked once in a while, but couldn’t really be counted on to deliver all the time. Piece of shit cars that ran most of the time, but that had chronic ailments that you had to work around with jumper cables and big screwdrivers. Cars that wouldn’t start or did unusual things when it rained or when you tried to drive up a steep hill. Appliances with missing buttons that made sinister noises and that might burst apart, but never did. Weird, unsavory heating devices that smoked or threatened to electrocute you. Thumping, grunting washing machines that danced across the floor. Windows that wouldn’t open, wouldn’t close, or stuck somewhere between. Toilets that required handle-jiggling and big buckets of water to stop running, start running, or flush properly.

In short, life as I knew it didn’t work and living was an ongoing improvisation and problem solving exercise.

Working with computers, and technology in general was and still is fucked up, arbitrary, and inconsistent. And that was OK with me. I felt right at home.

But some people just couldn’t deal. They were reasonably intelligent people but they were used to secretaries they could order around, and then poof! The secretaries were gone and in their place they had a chunk of dumb metal with a tube on top and a keyboard.

The secret is simple. Flexibility. Computers and technology in general are totally inflexible in the human sense, at least for now. So all the flexibility in the situation has to come from you-know-who. And you have to improvise. If you can’t do it one way, you have to come up with a dozen other ways to do it and try each one ’till you find one that works.

Then I discovered that the people who didn’t have this ability, didn’t have it because they’d never needed it. They didn’t need it because they had always done what they were doing now — calling someone. And the someone they were calling was me.

Soon after I graduated from college, I found myself, a newly minted Bachelor of Arts, working in a poultry slaughterhouse cutting whole chicken carcasses into pieces. My immediate supervisor was someone from the Special Ed classes at the high school I’d attended. My first day on the line, I looked around and noted that most of the people around me were missing teeth. And then I noticed that the people right around me were missing fingers too. I was issued three razor-sharp knives and a stainless-steel mesh glove like a knight’s gauntlet for my other hand. The gloves were a recent development as the digitally challenged would attest. Right across from me, 18 inches away were three other guys, heavily tatooed, with the same sharp knives. They were there on work release.

If I could have called someone to change that situation, I would have. Really. But since there was no one to call and I needed the money, I had to figure out a way to deal and dealing took flexibility and improvisation.

My first serious PC support gig was with a magazine publisher who specialized in small, niche magazines about special interests — hobbies of the rich, I used to call them. It took me about a day and a half on the job to figure out that the people who actually wrote the stuff in the magazines — aside from the ads, that is — were the least important people there. Consequently, they didn’t make much money. And because they didn’t make much money, they tended to be the wives or children of successful men. People with allowances.

They also got the absolute shittiest computers. The real trash. Of course, this didn’t mesh very well with the sense of entitlement you get from an allowance and seeing your name in print.

What they all wanted was a Macintosh. But at $4000, it wasn’t going to happen, at least for an editor.

Specialty magazine production is boilerplate. The titles are created by entrepreneurs who sell out and move on. By the time the magazines reach a specialty publisher, they are in the market exploitation phase. The physical layout and appearance of each title are predetermined. The bulk of editorial items recur each month, and feature article thematics recur on a seasonal basis to support the sale of advertising. Features are purchased from freelancers, at about $300 each.

You don’t have to be HL Mencken to put these titles out — it’s a paint-by-numbers proposition.

Meanwhile, as a PC support person, I solved unique problems all the time, often with wildly varying resource and time constraints.

When the issue of Macintosh versus PC came up, these paragons of letters told me that I didn’t understand their need for Macintosh computers because I wasn’t a ‘creative person’. Uh huh. Ok.

So, as PC support person, I became the the foil for their dissatisfaction. I found myself cast as an apologist for the plodding, proletarian, bean-counting PC versus the dashing, aristocratic, creative Macintosh.

I experienced first-hand the powerful results of Steve Jobs and his genius for life-style technology marketing.

Of course, these editor-savants would have been equally clueless and demanding with a Macintosh, or any computer for that matter.

Servants are user-friendly. Computers, on the other hand, are tedious and frustrating. But infinitely powerful, as Turing pointed out. A machine that can model and contain any other machine. A prosthesis and lever for the mind.

LP’s on vinyl this morning: ‘Sense and Sensuality’ by the AuPairs, ‘Wild Planet’ by the B-52’s.
Shuffling right now on the iPod: ‘Mr. Lee’ by the Bobbettes