Question One: Is it okay to shoot a computer that torments you?

PATIENCE, my mother used to boast to her friends, was my greatest asset as a computer instructor to people of my mother and her friends’ age. She spoke highly of my problem solving skills too.

It was the way I was able to sit patiently at her computer and solve all the problems she had encountered that did it.

After solving them, I would attempt to arm her with the wherewithal to solve them too.

‘See these headings at the top of the screen?’ I’d say. ‘They are called drop down menus. It is always a good idea to click on them and see the options they offer you. Often the answer to your problem lies in one of them.’

Ever the diligent student, my mother would write these little vignettes down and refer to them the next time she ran into problems.

Even more patience was required to convince my father that computers and everything associated with them were not a global conspiracy to drive the over-60s to paroxysms of incandescence.

‘See? Complete waste of time. Utterly maddening,’ he’d say at the first sign of trouble.

Like a patient father teaching his infant child to ride a bicycle, I’d urge him to persevere.

‘Remember,’ I’d say. ‘It’s all based on logic. All you have to do is think logically and, 99 times out of 100, you’ll work it out.’

Ever the recalcitrant student, he’d eye the offending machine with extreme suspicion. What a time of it I had getting those two up to speed with the 21st century.

And how right, it seems, my father was. It was a complete waste of time. It is utterly maddening. Last month, Scottish computer science pupils sat this year’s National 5 exam, a paper that their teachers now say was riddled with mistakes and included a question to which there could be no possible answer.

According to one teacher from an Edinburgh private school, the paper was ‘the most error-strewn and, in places, incomprehensible examination’ he had ever seen.

Some questions were ‘so poorly designed and worded that even the most able and best prepared of candidates could well be defeated by them’.

There is a part of me (the dying embers, perhaps, of the patient part) which feels terrible for students wrong-footed by illogical, ill-thought out gobbledygook on an important exam paper.

Misfortune

But there is another part which considers their misfortune richly appropriate.

For error-strewn, incomprehensible, badly designed and liable to defeat even the most able of users is exactly what computer technology has become in the past decade. And I have lost all patience with it.

‘That’s right, see how it feels,’ I want to say to the examinees.

Experience the dismal reality of technology programmed by morons. Wonder who gives these people jobs, why their work wasn’t checked. Wrench clumps of hair clean away from the scalp in sheer frustration. I want to remind them that, one day soon, they could be the ones designing web pages for email services used by millions.

That being the case, how marvellous it would be if users were actually taken to their emails when they logged in. How reassuring for Luddites if, somewhere in the mess of options, was a button saying something like ‘go to email’.

One day soon, these examinees could be designing car hire websites such as the one I used last week.

‘Forgotten your password?’ it asked. That indeed was my predicament. Not to worry, just enter your email address. I did. ‘Email address not recognised.’

Perhaps I had used my other address when I registered. I entered it instead. ‘Sorry, that email address belongs to an existing customer.’ Yes, fool. Me!

Fine, let’s create an entirely new account. ‘Email address not recognised.’

Of course, you don’t recognise it, pond life! I am introducing it to you.

As precious minutes slip away, those mouse clicks and keyboard taps become more emphatic; soon they border on hardware abuse.

On the scale of computer rage (which is a thing – Google it some time when you’re calm) we are just a couple of disappointments away from throwing the machine through the nearest window.

Last year, a man in Colorado Springs went further, dragging the uncooperative apparatus into a back alley and shooting it full of holes with a pistol. That shut it up. When it was dead, he told police, ‘the angels sang on high’.

I do not like my mother or my father to think of me as the kind of son who would identify with a berserk American summarily executing a computer which defied his wishes.

Not after they used to think of me as that unruffled interface between their generation and the mystifying technology of the next one. Not after my mother told all her friends how patient I was.

Obsolete

The problem is things have changed. And things keep changing.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to familiarise myself with the latest version of iTunes and, even if I had, yet another version would be released before I had finished reading the help file.

None of these new versions, it seems to me, is an improvement on the last. They serve only to render hard-won knowledge obsolete.

So listen up, disgruntled computer science students of Scotland. Let this serve as a valuable lesson.

It may be that wrong has been done to you but, down the line, you would surely have done wrong to people like me, to people like the Colorado motherboard murderer. It ends here, okay? Imbue your computer programming with common sense, with logic and intuitiveness like they used to when I was young and alert. Do not reduce me to ranting about newfangled gizmos to my daughter. Humiliate me no more on the slippery slope to middle-aged technophobia. Let my parents think I’m still the man.