Open Sez-me

James Lileks has a rumination (scroll down) on the cyclical geek reveille call for a new paradigm in computer interfaces. "We've got to come up with something better than the desktop" is the mantra. I agree with him that the desktop is just fine, thank you. Most other suggestions make you wonder if the presenter eats spaghetti with a spoon.

My only quibble is he wants for the day when we can talk to our computers, ala Star Trek. I think that would just be a mess. The formalized language you would have to use to address a computer would be harder to learn than using menus and buttons - and you'd sound like Spock with aphasia. Offices would sound like a Tourette's convention at echo canyon. No one could use the words "fuck" (men's most common choice) or "baby" (women's favorite) as a password because it would unlock half of the PCs in a 5-cubicle area. And since most operating systems get twitchy when you simply flip rapidly between windows, cutting, pasting and typing away, imagine what would happen if you were in the middle of dictating something, and the toddler approached the dog with a sharp stick and a lighter. "Sweetheart! What are you doing! Put that down! Owie! Where'd you get that?! Leave Muffin alone. Fire hurts! Stick hurts! Come back here! You're going to get a time out young lady! I'll paddle your behind! Watch out for the...oh DAMMIT! [large thunk and much loud crying in background] HONEY!" You'd come back to discover your computer had blown the hell up, reformatted the hard drive, or patchily transcribed the whole episode and emailed it to your boss. And forever afterward, your boss would be haunted by a mental picture of you dressed up in an all-leather hooded fetish suit, replete with zippers, suspended only from your nipple piercings while your spouse tortures you with hot wax and pointy things.

The sheer technical feat of teaching a computer when to listen to you, when to ignore you, and to be able to tell the difference between a command and content would be on the same scale as training cats to swim in formation. Theoretically it's possible, but is it likely it will ever happen? No, we're pretty much stuck with the keyboard for good.

TLD: This reminds me of a true story. I once managed a group of content editors for a text-searchable computer product (think of Google on CD). The workforce was mostly young men and women, fresh out of college or jail, because it was scut work, and most people moved on within a year to find something more meaningful to do, like bagging groceries or taking tickets at a movie theatre. Once, probably while in a boredom trance, one of the guys accidentally pasted a letter he was writing to a buddy into the middle of one of our regulatory documents. It was one of those mid-twenties crisis, is this all there is, I could stand to get laid more, we got sooo wasted last Saturday, kinds of epistles; we've all written and read them at one time or another. Cut to a couple months later, one of our sales folks was giving a demo, happened to get a search hit on one of words in this letter, and pulls it up to show the potential customer. There, in the middle of all this boring govt. regulatory text about blood clotting agents or something there is something like this: "I just don't know what to do with my life. I know! I want to dance!" I was the guy's boss at the time, so I had the onerous task of pointing out his error to him, admonishing him to be careful, and face the sheer mortification and embarrassment the guy went through. The look on his face conjured the image, to me, of an agoraphobic acrophobe standing at the open door of a skydiving plane, staring down the full 15,000 feet to the drop site, his pants and underwear flapping around his ankles, while that really hot girl he has a crush on is pointing at him (or "little him") and laughing. I tried to help us both get past it with a little levity, but I've never perfected crushing a beer can against my forehead, and to explain why I had my head bandaged for a couple weeks always lead to the earlier story. (OK, I made up the part about crushing the beer can; I think in reality I told him he could mail the CD to his buddy rather than the letter, and instruct him to search on "angst".) Anyway, he quit inside of a couple months, I think. Oh well. Sometimes you gotta cut ties, put out the thumb, and cross a state line to catch up again with your dignity.