Tag: computers

Saved by a Stubby Pencil

June 28th, 2026

AI is here and it’s not going anywhere. The new technology is subject of much scrutiny and controversy. People are upset about AI forcing humans out of jobs. People are up in arms about huge data centers and their massive consumption of electricity and water. There is the question of what we should do with AI. Soon, the question will be, “What do we do without it?”

Innovations have always caused disruption in society. New skills have to be learned and old ones discarded. In my life there have been rapid and unexpected changes. Nowadays, who needs to know how to do long division or how to balance a check book or how to drive a car with a manual transmission? When I was young, it was important to be proficient with those tasks. Now, who cares?

I have a Toyota Corolla with a six-speed transmission. Yes, I know it’s archaic. At this point in time, a stick shift is more of an antitheft device than anything else. When I think about it, learning to use a stick was much more than just learning how to drive a car. Driving a stick required a person to coordinate all of their limbs in one fluid motion. Using a stick shift also forced a person to pay attention to several types of sensory input simultaneously: the sound of the engine rpms, the view of the traffic surrounding the vehicle, the feel of the transmission, and maybe the smell of burning clutch. Learning to drive stick taught a person to do more than just operate a vehicle. I wish I had learned to drive stick shift before I went to flight school. The experience might have helped me to learn how to fly a helicopter more easily.

The flow of technology generally goes in only one direction. Things continually become more efficient, more interconnected, and more fragile. There are examples in history of technological expertise being lost. Those episodes are uniformly ugly. Going back to the old ways is almost always difficult, and often impossible. Let me give you an example from my work life.

Back in 1988, I started a job as a dock supervisor at a trucking company. We had computers then, but they were clumsy cumbersome machines. There was no internet worth mentioning. The devices were mainly used to crunch numbers for reports and stats. The day-to-day operation on the loading dock and with the city drivers was done with mountains of paper and landline telephones.

For instance, the dispatcher had to keep track of shipments to be picked up and the whereabouts of his drivers by telephone. The office personnel took calls from customers for pickups and wrote down the information on cards that the dispatcher posted on a board. The dispatcher had to wait for a driver to call him before he could assign him some pickups. The drivers had beepers, which really only told the driver to find a landline and call the dispatcher ASAP. The whole process was tedious and inefficient, but the work got done. I had a similar operation on the dock. I was responsible for getting hundreds of shipments loaded and delivered to scores of customers each day. I handled an absurdly large amount of paperwork, and somehow it all got done.

Fast forward to the year I retired. In 2015 we had plenty of new technology and everybody had a handheld computer. The dockworkers and the drivers scanned the codes on the shipments to load them on to trailers. The amount of paper involved was minimal. The activity on the dock and in the city could be monitored in real time. Customers sent their pickup requests to us online. The phones did not ring very often. Everything was done on a screen. It was impressive.

Then the apocalypse hit. One day all the computers companywide went down. The phone rang constantly because the customers had to call in their pickup orders. Dispatch was flooded with notes on scraps of paper. Trailers that came to us from faraway cities were like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. Every shipment inside them was a surprise to us. We did not know what freight was coming to us, and we did not know how to deliver it to our local customers. We were lost.

A few of us had been working this shift for years (or decades) and based on our collective experience, we knew where to load a shipment without a computer or even without any paperwork. So, we routed every inbound shipment by just looking at the name and address of the delivery customer. We told the forklift drivers what to put into which trailer. We had them make up delivery paperwork by copying packing lists. We gave the ersatz delivery receipts to the drivers for the customers to sign. Because of our institutional memory, we got almost all of the shipments delivered that day. We remembered how we had done the work before the computers had taken over. That made all the difference.

That was ten years ago. I doubt that there is that kind of collective memory at my old workplace now. I am almost certain that if there was a total computer failure there, everything would come to a screeching halt. That’s the problem when a new technology takes over. There is no turning back.

Ten years ago, we were saved by a copy machine and a stubby pencil.

What happens when AI is running the show?

Involuntarily Offline

November 9th, 2025

Ten days ago, my laptop took a shit. I was kind of expecting this to happen at some point. The laptop was already six years old, which meant that it was well into obsolescence. In addition to that, I had dropped it a couple years ago creating an ugly crack at the corner near the on/off button. The crack had increased in size over time. Finally, the computer refused to allow me to type on the keyboard. I was required to do something if I wanted to go online.

I took the ancient laptop to Best Buy. I have total coverage with Geek Squad, and I planned on using it. It should be noted that it is nearly impossible to go into a Best Buy and physically talk to a Geek Squad agent without an appointment. Just getting an appointment is no easy task either. A person either has to do it online (which is not possible if the device, like mine, doesn’t work) or do it on the phone, which requires a number of long and unpleasant steps. In any case, I had an appointment, and I did in fact speak with a human being.

I turned in the computer for repair, and I was informed via text that the work was completed a day later. I went to the store to pick up my resurrected laptop. I should have had an appointment for this, but somebody handled my issue anyway. The man explained that they had not been able to replicate the problem with the keyboard. He told me this as he played around with the computer. Then he realized that, yes indeed, the keyboard did not work. The tech sighed and said,

“This always happens during check out.”

He gave the crack in the corner a hard stare and told me,

“That may be the death sentence right there. There is lot going on underneath that crack, and the mother board might be damaged.”

I asked him, “So, you are telling me to buy a new one?”

“Well, you could…”

I interrupted him, “Never mind. Where do I go to buy a laptop?”

He pointed across the room. “The salesperson will help you.”

The sales guy did help, and then he took me right back to Geek Squad, so that they could transfer the data from the old computer to the new one. The bottom line was that it would take at least two days to transfer the data from the memory. I bowed to the inevitable and left both computers in their hands.

After two days, I once again went to the store. I got my brand-new Hewlett-Packard Omni Book and proudly took it home. I plugged it in and got online. It worked splendidly for five minutes and then it didn’t. It froze up completely every five minutes.

Fuck.

I restarted it and rebooted it and I finally went to the Best Buy site to chat with a Geek Squad agent with a multi-syllable first name. He did a complete tuneup on it. I tried it again. No change. I contacted Best Buy again, and this time the agent threw up his hands in despair and gave me an appointment to visit another store.

Nice.

I had to wait two days to go to the store. In the meantime, I tried to write on my blog using the partially incapacitated laptop. That was a bitch. I had to restart the computer several times and find the page where it locked up. I finally finished the essay (my previous post on this blog), but it cured my desire to go online.

As this saga continued, I came to understand that I really only need to go online for maybe a few minutes a day. The rest of my time was wasted reading articles on the Internet that either depressed or infuriated me. I had been trying to ween myself off the computer before it quit on me. I never take the laptop with me anywhere. It stays at home. I don’t have a tablet or a smart phone. I am attempting to avoid being a prisoner of the Matrix. I actually want to be part of the physical world in all of its beauty and horror. This takes a certain amount of effort.

I took the new but broken laptop to Geek Squad. A pleasant young woman asked whether I had gone online for help. I assured her that I had already jumped through all of the required hoops before coming to her. She determined that I was right. The piece of shit was broken. Fortunately, my coverage allowed me to swap out the new/old laptop for a new/new laptop. Of course, I had to let Geek Squad transfer the data again. That took another two days and required yet another appointment.

This afternoon, at long last, I went to the store, and the young lady presented me with a fresh, data-infused laptop. I took it home. Miracle of miracle, it works just fine.

That’s why I am writing to you now.