Let the geeks invent, but do not let them design

“With a 30% mortality rate,” began the voice over  of a mid-brow history programme on the BBC earlier this week, “your chances of survival were low”.

I often think that ribbing live comments on the telly is a tad unfair. We would all be prone to clangers if asked to do the news, or sports commentaries, at the drop of a hat. In London last week, for instance, I was in Boots having been asked to get (but unable to find) Brita water filters. So I asked the assistant where the Brita wilter farters were. In front of four million people, that sort of thing can cut an ambitious career off long before its prime.

But the Beeb’s history slot must have been months in the making. The voice-over script would’ve been pored over by dozens of bright young things. The narrator must’ve rehearsed it again and again. Yet not one of them saw how bloody silly it is to suggest that with 70% of people surviving, your chances of survival are low.

Human error of this kind isn’t unforgivable, but it is inexcusable among large groups of professionals. However, it’s human error. We all (especially me) rail on about computers, software and technology in general, but it’s all human error: none of this stuff is as yet (thank God) able to design and program itself.

When human design is based on hubris, it is not so much fair game for satire, as absolutely de rigeur that the merciless mickey be taken. For nobody is more convinced of his or her perfection than The Geek. This is despite the obvious fact that the Geek is the worst curse ever visited upon humanity – the ultimate example of letting that barmy relative out of the attic. There is no reason for such a thing to happen, only the feeble excuses of marketing people who lack the bottle to tell geeks that, if they behave and eat the food shoved under the door to them, they get to stay alive…..but that any signs at all of trying to escape will be met by a shoot-to-kill policy. The hope of any sane management person acting under the terms of that contract ought to be that geeks will indeed  try to break free, and be wiped out in the process. Then real, socialised people can at last be trained to design and write programs.

If there seems to you a certain homicidal vehemence in that last paragraph, well done: you spotted the degree to which geek stupidity has been winding me up since the early days of the personal computer. In recent months, my ire has been dedicated to those people who are not just stupid but also nasty. Only occasionally now – after a beautifully sunny southern French day in which little or no thought has been given to Rupert Murdoch, Tim Geithner or David Cameron – does my attention wander back in the relative cool of evening to the ubiquitously dickheaded geek.

Today, the catalyst of reminder about geekydegook was the failure of a program to respond at just the very moment when its unwillingness to respond was not required. When you’re doing something tedious and mundane on a laptop, all programs everywhere respond like a Pavlov dog slavering for its fix of dogochocs. But if the download of a secret document even Julian Assange doesn’t know about is at stake, the geek conspiracy ensures that a panel will appear announcing ‘An unexpected error has occurred’.

This happened to me today. It’s happened many times before, and each time it does, I ask myself, ‘WTF am I supposed to do with that information?’ (Truth be told, what I normally do is stand up and yell the words out loud in full. As a result, the dogs scarper off to the end of the garden and stay there for hours afterwards).

But the geek isn’t content with creating deadly inconvenience: dear me, no. A pack of Saxa table salt has to be poured onto the gaping wound. So the next panel asked me the sort of question that few people beyond Salvador Dali would’ve appreciated:

‘The Normal dot file profile has been changed. Do you wish to save those changes?’

Can you imagine how, on D-Day, Eisenhower might have reacted if one of his logistics planners had asked him, “As we seem to be struggling on Omaha Beach, would you like to play a video game or watch a DVD?” I’m told Ike had a longer fuse than me, so he would probably just have had the guy committed and then got on with his day. More than likely, however, he wouldn‘t have been distracted by a second panel which blotted out the first one in order to tell me that the program wasn’t responding.

As I took out the mains lead in order to discuss this development with my more technically advanced wife, another panel told me that it was safe to remove the mains lead. For the UXB officer deciding which of those the green, brown and red wires inside a 1943 Nazi bomb to cut, post hoc approval of having taken the right decision isn’t much use afterwards: you’re alive, you know this, you don’t need some f**kwitted panel to confirm it. But you see, this is the way the geek mind works: the ability to tell or ask us something comes miles ahead of any consideration about whether this could be (a) useful or (b) likely to create a bp reading of 170/130.

While waiting for the program to relaunch itself, I went to my Gmail account to warn a client that there might be problems with the document, the obtaining of which had resulted in the death of at least seven CIA field operatives. Deciding for the fourth time this week that it had forgotten who I am, Gmail illogically offered a line of dots corresponding to my  password, so I pressed enter. Gmail turned down the password it had given me.

As I stared at this piece of insanely reflexive security, my mobile went ‘pang’. The incoming message was from Vodafone, welcoming me to France. We arrived at our French house in early April. This is my twenty-seventh welcome to the Fifth Republic, and if I’m being frank here, I’m all welcomed out.

The pc program got itself up and running again, but at the point of downloading, yet another panel came up to assert, ‘This program is not responding.’ From here onwards, everything became increasingly amphetamine in nature. Did I want to end ‘End Program’ now, the penultimate panel asked. Only, like, if I did, I would lose any unsaved data. But the data I wanted was lost anyway. So I plumped to end it all: what did I have to lose?

‘The End Program facility is not responding’ said the last and final panel. When the program ending programs isn’t responding, what is a person to do?

My instinct was to hide behind the sofa. But my body is made of sterner stuff, and so I pressed that top left button on every pc keyboard which means ‘OFF’. After a high-anxiety interval, the pc screen went ‘peeowwwur’, and turned to black.

In the end, I used the landline phone to ring my contact and ask her to send the document file to my Microsoft email address. As no geek has ever heard of (let alone used) a landline telephone, everything thereafter went smoothly. Geeks are like flies: if you move below their line of flight, you can catch the buggers napping.

Do we need these people? Reluctantly I have to admit that yes, we probably do. They are like Wayne Rooney: the bloke is Mr Potato Head, but without him a football match really is 22 blokes thwacking spherical leather around in a pointless manner. But geeks must be controlled. The sort of onerous house arrest inflicted on DSK until yesterday is an excellent model: not only would it be a geek’s idea of Nirvana (they never go out anyway) but giving them luxurious surroundings is the equivalent of the 7th Cavalry giving Native Americans shiny beads and whisky – intoxicating, and more than enough to keep them happy.

What we must never, ever do in future is give them anything remotely suggesting power. For that road is littered with Towers of Babel, people speaking indecipherable tongues, and the wrath of God.