by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1996 by Michael Finley

Lately, I have noticed that the problems people have been bringing me have been of an almost mystical, what-the? character. First there was my mathematician friend Paul. Paul always calls with odd complaints, but this one took the cake. His daughter Becky, 13, had created a web site to display three tessellations -- M.C. Escher-like drawings she made in a summer class.

The problem occurred during printing. The first drawing, and the third one, printed fine, but the second drawing was missing. Instead, the first drawing was repeated in its place.

It was weird, and it happened whether you viewed the file through Netscape or Internet Explorer, or printed it from several brands of laser printer. The HTML code appeared to be in proper order. So what was the deal there?

Paul, who badgered me mercilessly several years earlier about why the Windows 3.1 calculator couldn't correctly subtract zero from one, demanded to know why this was happening. I didn't understand the calculator problem then, and I don't understand the tesselation problem now. I sometimes experience anomalies printing from the Web, but I blame them on the inability of my Laserjet to interpret Java applets, which didn't exist when my printer was made. But this was weirder than that.

That very same day, my neighbor John said he was having troubles with Wordperfect for Windows. All his quote marks were appearing in a type size about four points larger than the surrounding type. It looked like his quotes were beginning and ending with a shout, but with a whisper in between. It not only printed that way, but it appeared that way on the screen.

I told John the same thing I told Paul, that I had no explanation for him. I mean, I could hypothesize that something was amiss in his configuration, perhaps a damaged bit of code that reinstalling might fix. Or maybe he could do an end-run around the problem by switching to straight quotes (") instead of the curly kind (").

This peculiarity emboldened me to confess to my own strange quirk. Every now and then, when I am doing desktop publishing using Ami Pro 3.1, I get to a space that I cannot write on. My cursor goes to the edge of it, I type a letter, and the letter jumps two inches away. There is no hidden frame there, nothing of that sort. It is like a haunted spot on the layout that I cannot type onto, and it's right in the middle of the page.

Tech support is not much help with these problems. When I mentioned my Ami Pro problem to Lotus, they just scratched their heads. I took it to my computer repair outfit. Their solution was draconian: reformat the hard drive and see if it went away. Which I did, and all my data went away, but the ghost in the machine did not.

When you have a true mystery with your computer, you can't hope to find a satisfactory explanation. Computing, I have concluded after many years of knuckle-biting, is a realm of much doing, but little understanding.

One time, I was sitting happily at my keyboard -- I seem to remember I was typing the word "cormorant" -- and everything suddenly went very dark and very quiet. When I took it in, I was not surprised to learn that the motherboard had fritzed out. I was surprised to learn that, in its death throes, the motherboard reached out to its children components (the modem, power supply, and hard drive), and fried them along with her. Some mom.

It was a catastrophe of biblical proportions. But, as in the story of Job, I was not permitted to understand why it had befallen me.

Chuck, my repair guy, just shrugged and said, "It went bad on you." Like the boatman on the River Styx, Chuck no longer wonders why bad computers happen to good users. There are no vacuum tubes, like in the old days, you can test and replace. Everything is solid state and integrated, and a subassembly is either good or it is bad. So Chuck just ferries the fallen across the water, pulls out their dead components and slides fresh new components in. No apologies and no explanations.

And I'm no better. I'm going to have to learn to explain to my friends, to lay it on the line, that there are more things in our software and hardware than are dreamt of in technical manuals. x

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Michael Finley has just learned that Techno-Crazed, much of which appeared first in these pages, has been remaindered. Console Mike by writing him at mfinley@mfinley.com, or visit him at http://mfinley.com.