Slashdot Mirror
Rage Against the Machines
wiredbeat2000 writes "Kent Norman is a cognitive psychologist and director of the Laboratory for Automation Psychology and Decision Processes at the University of Maryland. He studies -- and makes films about -- why people lose it, and smash their computers, PDAs, mice, ect. MIT's Technology Review has a story about his lab."
the machines don't smash their users, yet...
This is the second movie about Windows right?
my monitor didn't survive my last outburst, so I could actually read the story...
It's alive!
Me SMASH stupid plastic word-box!
Me love mouse. WHy mouse no fuzzy??
Aahhhhhhrhrrrrrggggg
is when you chain two car batteries together, and then hook them up the the first and last pins on a processor. Now that's overclocking.
Odd thing was, I think the Intel processor was at the same temperature as normal use.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
to strike one's computer in anger.
We must first create some sort of artificial intellegence within the computer with sensory perception. Only THEN can we slowly, painfully, and deliberately exact our revenge on it!
Sig it.
If the programmers at Microsoft would stop making so many unchecked buffers and stupid wizards that dont work maybe people woule calm down alittle more.
/.ed, wait there it went...
Also this guy is going to be raging when his site gets
..should be locked up for life. Machines are beautiful.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I've always wondered how to cook an hard disk.
I feel better
Well, I only smash my machines when they talk back to me. Normally I try to treat them with dignity and respect, but when they $*&! up, grind, groan, chew paper, start making funny knocking sounds or refuse to understand that when I pressed Delete and wiped out my spreadsheet I really meant to hit Enter then I start to get mad and then I exit out and my SuperNintendo emulator program refuses to output sound I feel myself getting hotter under the collar so I go on the web and look up Slashdot and there's a stupid &#)!#@ article like this then THAT'S IT. I'M GONNA GIVE THIS %*@$$$@!@$# piece of ##*%!*#(^ $!)#@$% THE $*!*$(# IT WILL NEVER $@*#~$($%% FORGET!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They must be shot. Or let loose in unsanitary public toilets.
A blog like any other.
You forgot, "imagine a beowulf cluster of smashed computers", or I guess, "Imagine a smashed beowulf cluster"
As for me, I'm going back to my "Santa gets Clusterfucked" movie.
Monstar L
clicky
Tee hee
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
The Solution: Rather than bottling up the frustration with technology and entering into "techno-frustration denial," we propose to let the user vent in safe, controlled, and vicarious ways.
I think a better solution would be to throw angry people into a pit and let them bludgeon each other to death with computer parts. Sort of like ThunderDome but with keyboards and mice instead of chainsaws and giant hammers...
I've never broken anything but I have tested the robustness of my keyboard a few times.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
Please return the man's red stapler.
you have some serious issues.
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
We're not that much more evolved from chimpanzees.
Some less than others.
I nearly took it out on my keyboard when the site slowed to a crawl...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Well, yeah, some of you bastards would, but that's not the point. Oh, and so would Russell Crowe.
The computer is sick and malfunctioning because some asshole installed Windows on it! Take a hammer to that guy, and not the poor computer.
For further enlightenment on this desperate plague afflicitng our silicon bretheren, call 1-888-HELP4PC, and give generously.
--- Ban humanity.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think people smash their computers because of the need for this.
Life is a journey. . . enjoy it!
Sometimes me and my friends we prepare ghetto lans at somebody's house and we usually play fps games or red alert.
:x
What happended is once one of my friends got so pissed off at the so-called "bullshit". He then smashed his logitech mouse on his desk and we had to lend him another so he could until play until the end. It was funny though. Even he laughed at what he did.
If you ask me, I pay for this hardware and no matter how much "bs" I'll get, I'd never think of damaging anything under my name.
Only hardware I get pissed at is the monitors at school by smacking them cause sometimes I forget to close oracle cause it takes up 100mb easy
Smashing their keyboard? vhglbdlfgvkbgnb;f.lkjbn/
Back in my day, we watched T.V. by candlelight.
The computers will do what you tell them to do and not what you want to do!
Consider this first. This will reduce the problem. I don't say it will solve all the problems.
I know how it feels when you write a long mail and you accidently press a Power button (on some mulitmedia keyboards which works only in windows) located very near to delete button. It happened to me today and I almost punched the monitor instantly.
Not to mention the good, clean fun you can have shooting old Macs, dead keyboards, and Microsoft executives.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
its etc. for 'et cetera'
Error: Id10t detected
..I worked at this little computer store in rural Louisiana. After a couple of years, we ended up with about 14 dead MGA/CGA/EGA monitors and decided to have some fun.
.365 derringer, as well (although I can't say I respect the accuracy; anything further away than about 4 feet was definitely not going to hit the 1-foot-square side of a monitor).
The monitors were all loaded up into a truck and taken out into the swamps, and set up on 55-gallon drums. Myself and three other people then proceeded to blow the fuck out of them with a number of weapons, everything from 9mm Glock pistol to 12-gauge assault shotguns. That is probably when I learned to respect the power of a
Quite fun.:-)
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
On slashdot there is normally a large number of garbage posts with each article but this one has 26 (as of now) and not one is worthwhile. Not a single one contributes anything meaningful in any way. This is a bit above average. So, this begs the question: what has changed?
I'd say that it might have something to due with the fact that it's Christmas Eve. All the slashdotters who are socially acceptable have left to spend the holiday with those they care about, leaving only the worst of the worst. I'd say that's a pretty interesting observation.
So I think this is pretty strong evidence that there is more to the slashdot idiot than meets the eye. They are actual social rejects. I say we pity these lonely bastards. Find one, hose him down, give him a nice sweater, and invite him over for christmas. The endless stories of "one time he overclocked this P4 box" but just think of the good deed you will have done.
I wasn't a computer science major, but I lived with three of them in college. Ritually sacrificing a few old machines every year was a good outlet for stress. Try it sometime!
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Im Calm Like a Bomb
except for all those computers i've dropped off bridges . . . . .
Keyboards are replacable. People, less so.
One of the fun parts of my job is discarding old dead hardware. Got a monitor that's blinked out. No problem, replace the monitor, take the old one to the back and beat the everloving sh*t out o fit.
In fact, we're supposed to take out certain types of hardware. I guess that at one time we threw out some dead PC's/monitors etc that looked good and were accused of wastefulness (I think there was a news article). By smashing the equipment to bits, we ensure that it looks broken enough... and it helps keep away the garbage pickers that jump in trash bins looking for salvagable material.
"PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean?"
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
iexplore.exe
This is one of those witty signatures that you'll remember.
Dude... that was awesome
No I am not 12, why do you ask?
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Lag is part of the challenge! Don't aim where they are... aim where they are going to be!
And so that's the root of why people "lose" it. Unless the way technology is perceived differently (you don't see Japanese folks 'smashing' their tech toys on a routine basis), our professor from the article will have a nice secure job,
and a lot of useless equipment.
Any possible therapy? Why yes! Just read the directions...., doh.
One of the funniest things I have seen on the internet is a video clip of some working stiff beating the snot out of his computer. You can see it at www.cs.unlv.edu/~acm/badday.mpg. Absolutely hilarious!
What is your penile percentile?
On the rare occasions when I get mad at my computer, I find that I'm either trying to install something or use someone's program. Rarely do I get mad because of my own programs.
On the rare occasions that I get mad because of my own programs, I find that my anger is caused by a problem I could have solved given the time.
Now, on those rare rare occasions when I get mad because I don't have the time to make my stuff work, I blame it on society. That DAMN economic and value system where you have to work to be able to REALLY work, that kills me! Really, society is the root of all evil!
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...
I know out of all the readership of Slashdot, there have to be some good smash stories. My best are driving down a forest-lined road aptly named the Audubon at 85mph with an Amstrad 386 in tow, or when I threw my malfunctioning KDS 14" monitor off the balcony when I was at college. Good times.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
I've done this many other times, all pointedly avoiding the computer but hitting something else in the area. Only time I hit the computer was in high school, where I picked up the keyboard, hit the table with it, hit the monitor with it, then hit the kid that was picking on me. Now thats debugging.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
the line is "PC LOAD LETTER, what the FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?" merry christmas
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Anyone want to buy the system I built to play Half Life 2? $2000.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
They were watching... always watching... plotting against us... they had to be smashed... before they became alive and killed us all...
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Does anybody else have problems with the "Click here for more images of computer killing" script? I meant technical problems, not moral problems. The window that pops up follows my mouse cursor, so I can't close the freaking box.
One of the guys at work has a fairly high-strung wife.
She was having trouble with Windows on her nearly-new laptop, so instead of asking me to fix it, she HEAVED IT at the floor, breaking it.
Then she went out and bought a new laptop.
Her old laptop still functioned after the ordeal (the screen hinges were snapped, and there were massive scars on the shell), so she gave it to her husband... for his birthday.
What a piece of work, eh?
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Perhaps it is because they are annoyed by the very silly way Slashdot posters decide which words shall correspond to which links, or how to distribute 12 links over 3 sentences.
WARNING: DO NOT LET DR. MARIO TOUCH YOUR GENITALS. HE IS NOT A REAL DOCTOR.
-Deskjet 610C (thrown out 2nd story apartment)
-Panasonic VCR (took a crowbar to it to recover a tape)
They were both absolute crap, but I was wondering... anyone ever destroy a machine that was still nice/worth something?
Peep that
In front of a machine, you must remain ... CALM LIKE A BOMB!
Caused me more darn trouble than actually just reading and signing the darn things myself. Typical machine.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
my first computer, which was an emachines something-or-other. it was pretty crummy as far as upgradeability goes and it shipped with windows me, so i wrote "Rage against eMachines" on the top of it :)
i also installed linux/freebsd... that helped quite a bit.
Check out this rage... The humans win, nuff said.
sigs are for fools and trolls. no signature is *always* appropriate. you should turn them off in your preferences.
by Spielberg/Kubrick..
The film has some interesting takes on 'killing your machine'..
I recommend it highly, despite the bad reviews. It's a much better, deeper film than they would indicate.. it left me thinking about it for weeks..
9 on a scale of 10..
Especially the ending..
-The end of work.
Its closer than you think...
" "And while most techies have a high tolerance for frustration when they go over the edge they can be excessive.
"I have one report of a frustrated geek who took his PC into the middle of a parking lot and dosed it with two gallons of gasoline. That's a bit much. Two cups would have been more than sufficient." "
Its at the end of the article and should have been in the slashdot blurb at the top.
I wish I knew where my kids got the idea that whipping the controller to the floor when they lose the game is a good idea.
No, it's not me.
Also, I work at a small newspaper that runs all OS-9 Macs. We're right across the street from the police station. The police have been notified by one of our writers (no joke) that if they see a pink imac come out the the 3rd floor window "with prejudice" they shouldn't bother responding.
So the truth isn't the rediculous idea that computer games make people violent, it's the computers themselves!
This just proves it: computers are really a highly advanced race of beings, sworn to silence and willing to sacrifice some of their vast army. They manipulate people into homicidal rages in an attempt to get human beings to wipe themselves out. They're trying to take over the world I tell you!!
*eyes his tea*
What're they putting in this stuff these days...
The man killer.
You can't handle the truth.
of the stupid shit they "research" in academia.
easier to remove.
Does anyone know how to uninstall AOL from your VCR? I was watching TechTV and hit the wrong button. Now I have an AOL icon on the screen no matter what movie I watch.
how I could just....*kill* a Mac!
id, look at this one. There goes another great game idea! Completely different from SPISPOPD, here comes the SCISPOPD! Mmm, with the Doom3 engine, this one is really going to rock, requiring little more than an old 486.
/. history record somewhere...
Oh, maybe I'm getting old already...
And don't forget to see those legally revised season's greetings. I have them on my
I accidentally made my 3rd gen iPod 2 milimetres thinner while going backwars with the car and I never understood how it got there.
On the bright side, its still working. You cant look at yourself on the back of it as if it were a mirror though.
... for a tech services company back in the late seventies and earliy eighties, before I got a clue. The company did service contracts on random minis and comms hardware. I have seen (and sometimes fixed):
A mini from which I extracted an extremely mushroomed and fragmented forty-five slug. Ripped up the front case door and five cards before it stopped. The DP manager "Didn't know what happened".
A small desktop micro that was completely trashed. It was sitting on a man's desk right next to an openable third-story window. There were bits of gravel from the parking lot embedded in the plastic. It was plenty obvious that he had simply opened the window and slid that puppy right off his desktop. Wanted it fixed under warranty.
Was asked if I could do anything about a small mini that had been run over multiple times by a forklift in the warehouse. Apparently the company president had gotten a little peeved, and probably a little wasted. Total loss. What had been a two by three by three foot cube was now about six inches tall, and had a considerably larger footprint.
Not to mention all the keyboards and monitors that just magically "stopped working" because of giant cracks in the screen or case
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
PC LOADLETTR?!
wtf does that mean?
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
and Happy War Mongering
Patriotically yours,
KIlgore Trout, CEO
Why do users smash PC's? Is it the hardware, I think not. Could it be the OS' itself? Hmmm, I think that their should be a study done. There is not mention of MAC's in the story. Here are some quotes from the article:
"Last year the company was asked to restore data from a laptop whose owner had placed the machine in the toilet and then flushed several times, a computer that had been used as a punching bag to relieve the owner's frustration with its sluggish performance, and boxes that had been fried by power surges, squished by falling steel beams, and run over by airplanes.
Sounds like a case of spyare / virus on this box. Just a guess. I know, I have no complaints on my box since its running *nix app's most of the time.
I've wondered this for a long time. What's the underlying reason why people get intensly, sometimes violently, annoyed with their computers? I know that computers can really be difficult sometimes. But there are some people out there who stay relatively calm about computer problems, yet other people "lose it" at the slightest setback.
Case in point. My roomate will loudly yell at the Playstation, claiming that the character in the game isn't "listening" to his controls. He gets so frusterated at it that I wonder why he's even playing it.
But, I digress. Is there any known psychological explaination to what triggers this type of behavior? (Although personal theories are welcome, I'm asking if there are any commonly agreed upon causes of this behaviorism.)
Signed
- A very calm engineering type
I must be part of a study into this behaviour! It's the only explanation that makes sense - I was right all along - my users couldn't possibly be as stupid as they are! It's all a test to see how much I can take before I lose it!
Yes.. I see it all clearly now.. I must escape.. but they will be watching me...
*foam at mouth*
I used to destroy a keyboard every couple of weeks at work, but only a couple after installing debian a few years ago. The reason for my snapups was the idiotic way Winblows works and assumes things and always asks useless questions and how the installers don't work and requesters steal focus and disk access is slow and the GUI just crashes and NOTHING JUST WORKS, every f***n thing has to be done in the clumsiest way possible and even then it has to be thrice to get it work! Hey where's the logic? Where's all the money poured into that useless piece of rhino feces? God I hate it hate it hate it. Feel like breaking something again.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
...anti-Bush folks... For such a "creative" bunch, you have become absolutely boring and predictable. (Score:2, Insightful)
Dammit, must EVERY thread have the political trolls modded up?
That makes so angry! I could just crush my keyboar...waitaminute...
You can't take the sky from me...
After reading that... I'm writing this in tears. I feel better... I too have struck gear in frustration.
:P
:P
Busted TV tubes have been thrown in roll-off box.
Have stood inside roll-off boxes and whipped Betacam SP tapes with vigour. I think there was a 3/4" machine too. That one made a good thunk
The day I had enough of "PC LOAD LETTER" Sadly, an HP4 died a few minutes later. It was kicked for weeks following, finally meeting the dumpster.
Several decelarations of "I need to kill a keyboard" shouted at the office, and then one would die. VISA purchasing card was real good about this.
Altough not generally a violent person, this kind of frustration works in a morphine kind of way... Instant release. It works... why be ashamed?
In Japan the Machines allready fight back...
_ 06_content .html
http://omind.free.fr/stock/aa_30s.avi
or the new RIAA/MPAA Robots...
http://www.analogik.com/mm_rev_tetra.asp
p.s. When Machines fine *nix (for a huge 9000TB P0RN collection) for the first time....
http://www.wilenkin.com/transformers/Video_player
---------------
"Clutch my testes, bloody squirrel humpers!!" -Happy Noodle Boy
That's why all my computers have Model M keyboards.
Push the envelope. Watch it bend. -Tool
friend of mine had a truck he bought used "as is, where is". It looked good and was driveable and the price was right so he bought it. turned out to be not such a bargain after all. A week later it started having problems, he'd fix one thing then another, yada yada, within a few weeks it was totally croaked sitting in the garage, needed thousands in repairs and beaucoup man hours labor to get it right(what he told me later). He snapped at one point, just lost it. He pushed it out into the yard and took a literal sledge hammer, one he normally used as a splitting maul for firewood, and creamed the living snot out of that truck until he couldn't swing the sledge any longer. Wasn't a window left, a light, an undented piece of sheet metal, nothing, T-totaled.
I thought it was pretty funny, as the guy was a professional mechanic!
As to computers, no, they've always worked for me or I made them at least work well enough that it wasn't too bad. Most of mine though have been *macs*. The one and only exception that I have that was annoying was this compaq,it's still sitting in the junk pile. Nice and shiny and functional at first,then I got some piece of bad ram and it just fubared any functionaltiy of the machine, it refuses to boot now, nothing. It was fine before I "upgraded it", and yes, I was careful with static putting in the Ram. After the new stick of RAM install, it booted for 60 seconds with a weird screen, then blanked out, useless ever since. No idea what's wrong with it, won't boot with the original RAM either. Not gonna drop one more penny on the thing. And to top it off it was a nice one I had given my GF,so I'm just being Mr. Nice Guy and upping her RAM for her, but N-O-O-O-O, so I had to fork over my spare machine to her so she would at least have something and she STILL reminds me "I killed her computer" occassionally.
grumble,
hmm, maybe I SHOULD haul it out and blast it with the 12 bore... hmmm
And blame it on videogames.
its the manifestation of the user frustration function in MS windows. A result of making software with a slant towards making people need MS, MS tech support or upgrades.... even for simple common sence tasks....
You're equating rationality with morality, which is a beginner's mistake.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
wowwow jiggajigga wowwow
;_;
Why'd those fuckers have to go and break up?
[o]_O
What I have seen in my particular non-computer industry is the idea (perhaps a meme?) that managers often think that competent people can be replaced by software in order to reduce costs.
At some point, the cost of computerization exceeds the benefits, but it's always useful for the PHBs to have total control and monitoring of the plebes.
I have a little statue of Kali above my computer, and when ever a component completey fails I ritually sacrafice it, and hang a part of it around her neck, as a warning to all the other hardware. It generally works, though right now I have a PSU and a CD-ROM drive waiting for my 10pd sledge of technological vengence.
The last one to go was a damn Epson Stylus. That one really ate it, the neighbors were frigtened of my, but not as much as that printer was on my size 13 steel toes.
It's not like I do this to live functioning hardware though, I generally coax it nicely, and vocally. Only dead fried stuff.
I think this is because we interact with machines almost in the way we interact with people, but people we can tell off, or correct, but hardware gets out of control, and can consitantly stand in our way. And thus we let of steam in the only way we know how, with large blugeoning objects.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
The results are shown as a Keynote presentation, "Computer Rage: Theory and Practice" converted to a PDF (372 KB).
Anger... rising... RISING! RAARGH!
it is that this article is placed. Not more than an hour ago I ripped the sliding draw off of my PC table in rage over some PHP code...
It's not the users fault...if they get mad and smash thier machines, it is the fault of the people and companies that designed these machines, if we had real technological companies as the two biggest "computer" companies...instead of what we currently have (Intel & MS), we could have a real computer revolution where computers enable people to be productive instead of draining our bank accounts..why, for instance are we still stuck with rebooting MS machines in order to install programs and why haven't we had multi-OS machines yet (good thing for the new IBM/apple multi-OS machine that is being developed).
The horrible complexity of XP and it's predicessors serve only to keep MS extractin $$ from us and keep the ordinairy user and business locked in permanently..not wonder MS is scared of open source...what we need is an international body of open source hardware innovation to keep MS away from computers, TV's, VCR/PVR's,ars,ell phones, etc. Just look at the crazy high prices that Intel has allways charged for CPU's...
I remenber in the late 80's and early 90's (Building wintel boxes) where Intel wiped out all the x86 comptitors and you could not use a non-intel CPU in your machine otherwise Intel would cut you off of CPU's, same with MS, it was considered illegal to send out a machine without MS installed and you could get sued for piracy by MS and/or cut off of MS products. Now we have AMD making beter and cheaper CPU's intel is having a hard time (good for AMD)...
I remmeber talking to somebody about how Intel CPU's were designed to burn out in about 2 to 3 years of continous use (engineered obsolescence), makes someone wonder about all those MS security upgrades etc, that have to be applied to windows...I am certain that my machine is slower nowadays (after a fresh install) and that my netscape gets buggy while if I open a IE window, exporer just cruises aslong...just explain that!
Time again to go open source and if I can find the money, to also get a Mac tower system (used to have a Mac SE, nice machine, easy to use, but pricey)
There is a computer which is running Windows ME, has MS Blaster, is running as a ghost spam server, and reboots every 3.452345 minutes. What did this computer get for Christmas? It got the crap beaten out of it by the user, because the user never took the time to upgrade to Linux.
"PC load letter? What the fuck does that mean?"
The printer is later stolen and beaten street-gang style.
can't do that on a Model M!
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
On behalf of the Nation of Humanoid Robots, I for one would like to welcome our new human overlords.
This might have something to do with the fact that my cardkey will no longer let me into the data center. Plus there was that trip to the ER when I forgot to power down the rack I was violating, but that's another story and perhaps I'll share it with the /. crowd once I have the worker's comp issues ironed out.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
A neighbor of mine held a "smash party" in his garage last year. Basically, people bring a bunch of stuff they want to break and some tools (sledgehammers, wrecking bars, etc.) to do the job. It's wantonly destructive but a hell of a lot of fun. Computers are a favorite item, and smashing a monitor is particuilarly satisfying.
This might be a good proactive way to vent those frustrations at computers and avoid destroying equipment that's still current and functional.
As I read this, I find myself comforting my computer and peripherals that I won't let this happen to them. That is truly sad...
It seems like the majority of the time someone is haivng a problem, and I try to solve it, the problem is just gone. Anyone else have this happen?
Help Fight SPAM today!
They got little sensors now that integrate onto a silicon die yet are little springs - instead of stupid logic gates. This is where the nerve should be. Now we just need a program to make the pc 'act right' when the keys are banged on real good like.
with absolutely NO sense of humor....
oh wait......!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
That has gotten more durable over the years is keyboards. Olden day keyboards had actual keys under each cap, and all the switches were mounted on PCB's. These days it's nothing but a rubber and plastic arrangement. The upside is that one can smash a keyboard repeatedly and so violently as to break it's hard plastic shell in half while leaving the rubber keys intact. Not that I've ever done that, though...
and chunks of concrete....you do the math.
he may be the cause :) Seriously though, whenever I got a new (cheapo) keyboard with
those stupid start/menu keys, the first thing
I do is remove them.
The definite story:
.
:D
.
:o
.
http://www.bash.org/?416857
===
<b orn1986> why the fuck isn't my disc drive working
<born1986> i fucking worked on that essay for three friggin' hours in school
<born1986> i now i cant finish it 'cos my fuckin drive ain't working
<Z00ass> you got the right drivers?
<born1986> hell yes
<born1986> it was working fine yesterday
<born1986> why does this shit always happen to me?
<Z00ass> maybe that little clip on the side is i nthe wrong position
<born1986> i havent touched it since school
<born1986> i'm growing impatient
<born1986> ANGRY even
<Z00ass> throw that shit out tha window
. .
<born1986> OMG i fuckin did it!!!
<born1986> FUCK!!!!!
<Z00ass> it works?
<born1986> no, i threw it out the window
<Z00ass> the disk?
<born1986> NO the whole drive
<born1986> i live on the 6th floor, made a nice *smash*
<Z00ass>
<born1986> FUCK SHIT FUCK
<born1986> THE DISK WAS STILL INSIDE
<born1986> brb
. .
<born1986> shit
<Z00ass> what? did ya break it?
<born1986> well i couldn't open the drive
<born1986> so i had to pound it against a rock
<Z00ass>
<born1986> quite HARD
<born1986> and you know what?
<born1986> that fucking disk wasnt even there
<Z00ass> ???
<born1986> i got so mad i threw the remaiders of the drive on to the freeway
<born1986> and when i got back upstairs i foud the disk inside my bag
<Z00ass> lol
<born1986> I NEVER EVEN PUT IT IN THE DRIVE
<born1986> i'm actually cryin right now
. .
<born1986> wonder if i could make that drive work again
<born1986> brb
Okay, I know, the devil is in the details. But this is one of those things that seems so obvious: people become enraged and destroy machines because the machines' designers gave no thought whatsoever to the way the machines will be used by normal people. I'm as abnormal as any other computerist, and I've perpetrated some horrendous user interfaces and truly perplexing semantics in my time, but at least I have enough insight to see the problems I've caused and the grace to be ashamed. It seems that some never to learn.
I call dibs on the vintage IBM Model M and the boxy original-style Logitech TrackMan (serial port variety, of course!) in that case!!