Ineffectively Effective

Its a crazy notion to have after a decade's worth of usability experience. After I have graduated to using good technology in the form of my new mac, it suddenly dawned on me that whatever I know about computers & IT systems (those necessary and unnecessary details), I owe it to the pain and suffering of my Windows-PC days.

I think this human brain is not equipped to enjoy life's simplest pleasures but to constantly mull over details. But I like this idea. I don't know a lot, but I know more than average about computers than there is to know. Apart from my graduation in the field of IT, I wouldn't have had the claim to knowing anything I know about computers. But this education begun a lot earlier in my childhood.

There was a dutiful windows PC at my uncle's place, which me and my cousin used to tinker with. Then there came a PC at my home, which I used to tinker with. The tinkering was less due to curiosity and more due to some abnormal machine behavior. To come to terms with it now, it was more about curiosity than about abnormal machine behavior. I distinctly remember dis-assembling my computer for the first time, each part lying on the floor as a spare part in a broken machine. I also remember what happened after that, I forgot how it looked before and how to put it back together again (big oops there). Then came a horrible 5 hour zig-saw workout, trying to put humpty dumpty together again. I put it back together and there it was, working like a charm. After that I knew a lot more about the relationships of various parts in the computer than I knew before. No college degree in IT can teach you that so effectively. 

I had developed a new found respect for closed systems because of this experience. The kind of software environment that windows has, also makes it easier to get various software applications to use for any of your needs. This is thanks to a very strong developer community which fed the outsized market share of Windows. Understanding how the hardware works, understanding the software environment have surely helped me appreciate the system more when I started programming. I think I owe my "big picture" viewing skill to my early days of suffering with my PC. 

To make the picture even bigger, I think suffering and pain have a lot more to offer than pleasure and satisfaction. Suffering creates a desperate need to get out of that feeling, and it probably is the source of the urge to act, to move, to aspire and to achieve. Suffering is also an extremely good educator. It holds us up by our heel, upside down, shows us how bad it can get, effectively pointing us to hell. Then it drops us and hopes that we land on our feet. If we fail to land on our feet, we succumb to the suffering and if we do land on our feet, we learn about our ability to stand amidst any great fall.

My PC days were filled with remarkable ineffectiveness and lots of lost productivity. I almost always ran out of Memory (applications became more powerful than my ability to upgrade my computer's memory). I always had the processor 5 times less effective than the one needed to run what I wanted to run. I was always ran out of hard disk space (data grows on you, mysteriously, until there is no space left on the disk). So all these things, could have held me down and I would have constantly demanded a better computer, almost every 6 months, which I did. But my father knew something I didn't, perhaps. He never gave in. So now I had to be satisfied with what hardware I had. It taught me amazing lessons about living within my means. Even now, I tend not to exceed my means (in money, time, computer memory) even when I have enough of it. I use it conservatively remembering the times when all these things got used up a lot faster when I didn't keep a check. What a way to learn to be frugal, I think!

So I owe most of my simple ways of life, to my small tete-a-tete with technology (or the lack of it). I am sure living in a urban setting has the same effects on the human mind. There is usually no adversity of opportunity, which teaches us to take it for granted. But I appreciate the people who come from the country side or from under privileged part of the society, where the opportunities for growth (personal and social) are so scarce that they grasp to any opportunity, big or small, with the same fervor. 

I think there are more lessons in adversity worth learning than we normally want to get away from.


I think I am beginning to agree to what Marcel Proust said, "We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full".