Techno-Rage

An article in the Wall Street Journal once described an anonymous video clip circulated widely by email that showed a "[m]ustachioed Everyman in a short-sleeved shirt hunched over a computer terminal, looking puzzled. Suddenly, he strikes the side of his monitor in frustration. As a curious co-worker peers over his cubicle, the man slams the keyboard into the monitor, knocking it to the floor. Rising from his chair, he goes after the fallen monitor with a final, ferocious kick."

The article went on to say that reaction to the clip had been "intense" and that it had apparently tapped into "a powerful undercurrent of techno-rage."

It's ironic that one needs to be moderately computer savvy to even send or view this video clip. The man in the video may well be an actor, but he touches a widespread, sympathetic chord in our business world. The frustration that difficult and unpleasant software-based products are bringing to our lives is rising rapidly.

Joke emails circulate on private email lists about "Computer Tourette's." This is a play on the disorder known as Tourette's syndrome, some of whose sufferers engage in uncontrollable bouts of swearing. The joke is that you can walk down the halls of most modern office buildings and hear otherwise-normal people sitting in front of their monitors, jaws clenched, swearing repeatedly in a rictus of tense fury. Who knows what triggered such an outburst: a misplaced file, an inaccessible image, or a frustrating interaction. Or maybe the program just blandly erased the user's only copy of a 500-page manuscript because he responded with a Yes to a confirmation dialog box, assuming that it had asked if he wanted to "save your changes" when it actually asked him if he wanted to "discard your work."