The Black Friday That Wasn’t

Introduction

I hate shopping.  Whenever I exchange my money for products or services, I feel a stab of defeat.  The value I place on my belongings grows in proportion to their age—that is, to how well I’ve managed to amortize their original cost.  Of course we all seek to get the best value for our dollar, but I have a bigger goal, which is to never spend anything and forever make do with what I already have.  I’m a retailer’s worst nightmare.

I also dislike crowds, holiday lotion snipers, displays of retail abandon, and above all Christmas music.  And yet, I ventured out to Best Buy on Black Friday to buy my mom a new computer.  Not my cup of tea, but I had a rare opportunity:  my brother Bryan and I were both visiting our mom in Oregon (which doesn’t happen that often); Bryan knows more about computers than I do; and getting a Black Friday discount on a big-ticket item like a computer is worth some suffering.

Plus, I must confess, I saw a silver lining to the horridness of the outing:  I could blog about how bad it was.  You know, kind of a Heart of Darkness thing.  That’s something I like about being a blogger:  when something bad happens to me, at least it stimulates my creative juices and I can often get an interesting post out of it, and when something really bad happens to me, I might get several interesting posts out of it.

As it turns out, and as you knew already, Black Friday was a bust this year.  In this post I examine what the failure of Black Friday means to America; describe my non-horrid (but still somewhat remarkable) trip to Best Buy; and lay out my novel strategy for increasing the success of Black Friday.

 Who cares about Black Friday?

When you think about it, it’s kind of weird that, our own shopping aside, the success or failure of Black Friday is a guaranteed source of “news.”  Every year, the sales numbers for this made-up retail event are as widely reported as the outcome of football games.  And yet outside of our own shopping, why should we care what other people did on their day off?

The answer, of course, is that Black Friday is widely (though not universally) regarded  as a measure of consumer confidence, which is a yardstick by which we measure the health of our economy, and in turn the state of the nation.

I’m not at all sure any of this makes sense.  Why should we measure the health of our nation by how recklessly we spend our money, on this one arbitrarily declared day, on stupid gifts that probably won’t delight our family and friends nearly as much as we hope?  If that set of four Harvest Pumpkin soup tureens were actually a worthwhile product, you’ve have bought it for yourself.  Holiday shopping is all about retailers playing us for suckers and I can’t see how their success validates the health of the nation.

Why put any stock in consumer confidence to begin with?  How many Americans actually understand their own finances, much less the intricacies of the overall global economy?  Besides, there’s evidence to show that being confident doesn’t necessarily lead to good outcomes.  American students lead the world in confidence, even while their academic performance is sub-par.

Some suggest that the poor Black Friday numbers could actually be good thing, like this Nasdaq writer who theorizes that, because the economy has improved, people are no longer desperate enough to tolerate massive crowds just to save money.  Prosperity aside, I’d be more optimistic about our nation if journalists like this guy used better grammar:  “More than 6 million less people than expected actually went out and shopped” makes me cringe.  (Just in case you missed it, it should have read “More than 6 million fewer people…” or, even better, “Over 6 million fewer people,” though I would also gladly accept “over 6 million lesser people” though that does alter the meaning somewhat.)

Cyber Monday, meanwhile, was bigger than ever.  This reassured a lot of people that the nation is still healthy.  I’d like to think this means Americans are getting more introverted.  But actually it’s probably got more to do with laziness and just wanting everything shipped to us.

Oddly, what I would consider the greatest factor leading to Black Friday’s dismal performance is something almost nobody reported on:  Adult Thursday.  Maybe you haven’t heard of this one; it made its debut this year.  On Adult Thursday (yes, Thanksgiving Day itself), adult websites offer steep discounts and (probably more importantly) a suspension of tracking cookies, so lustful men can save a few bucks while enjoying greater anonymity.

Is Adult Thursday a good thing?  Well, I’m torn.  On the plus side, it shows the same American ingenuity that produced the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue (“Hey, men love sports, but also babes—let’s give ‘em both!”).  Not since feasting on Thanksgiving was paired with watching football have we seen this kind of clever alignment; by indulging licentiousness as well, we’ve hit the trifecta!  On the negative side, I’m repulsed by the notion of would-be shoppers being too glutted on dopamine to leave the house on Friday.

(No, Adult Thursday isn’t a real thing … at least not until this post goes viral and causes life to imitate art.)

My trip to Best Buy

My wife thought I was crazy to brave Best Buy on Black Friday, until she grasped that I was sacrificing my own emotional health for my writing.  (Like me, she has had too charmed a life to be a great writer; happiness is like a consolation prize.)  But as it turned out, the dreadful hordes never showed up.  The place was less crowded than our local Target on any given day.  I found a parking spot right away.

I also got plenty of attention from the Best Buy customer service associates.  Too much, actually, since their input is practically worthless.  I’ve read articles lamenting how online giants like Amazon are eating the lunch of brick-and-mortar chains like Best Buy, but I have no sympathy.  I can get gobs of info on products by shopping online, but almost no info in the store despite the best efforts of earnest but hapless salespeople.

“I’m looking for a very basic PC for my mom,” I told the guy.  “She doesn’t want a touch-screen and doesn’t need a lot of CPU or memory.  But she is brand-conscious and will want something that looks good.”  So the guy lead me to an Acer computer.  An Acer?  Wasn’t he listening to me?  I told him, “Look, Acer is a terrible knockoff brand that neither gets nor deserves any respect, and this chintzy, shiny PC you’re showing me looks like something that was extruded from an industrial robot’s rectum.”

No, of course I didn’t really say that.  I just said, “I’m not really into Acers.”  Even this seemed to hurt the guy’s feelings and he only mumbled from this point forward, which was fine, since he knew nothing that wasn’t printed on the little placards stuck to the shelves (i.e., almost nothing at all). 

Meanwhile, I didn’t see any “SALE!” tags anywhere.  This amazed me.  I thought the whole point of Black Friday was creating a feeding frenzy, via steep discounts, that enabled a merchant to make big-time money through volume, not margin.  I really did say to the salesman, “I’m a little surprised not to see more discounts.  I thought this would be a giant discount extravaganza.”  He said, “Oh, lots of things are on sale … it’s just that the original prices aren’t shown.”  Well, no wonder Best Buy is hurting!  They don’t know the first rule of merchandizing, which is to draw maximum attention to how much the shopper will save.  (Needless to say, Best Buy also hasn’t grasped the second rule of merchandising, which is that you should artificially inflate the price of everything just so you can “discount” it without actually lowering margins.)

Now, as I see it, every salesman’s job is to remove my self-doubt and convince me that the product I’m looking at really is a good one, suits my needs, and is a good value.  The perfect pitch for the PC I ended up buying would go something like this:  “Well, it’s a great piece of luck that your mom doesn’t need a touch screen, because check out this little HP number over here.  It’s a real thoroughbred, with an industry-leading Intel i5 processor, gobs of RAM, an HD+ display, and BeatsAudio—and yet for some reason they spec’d it without a touch-screen.”  Here he would lower his voice a little and lean in to give me the inside scoop:  “It’s crazy.  I even talked to the distributor and said, ‘How can they not put a touch-screen on such a sweet machine?’  He said, ‘I know, it’s killing us, it’s why we had to price these bad boys at only $500.’  So yeah, they’re practically losing money on this model to begin with.  But you know how people are, they gotta have their touch-screens, and so this model still wasn’t moving, which is why we’re having to discount it another $100 today.  For somebody who wants top performance but doesn’t demand a touch-screen, well, this is a marriage in heaven!”  BOOM—I’d be sold.  But instead the guy said nothing.  He just stood there, hopefully, like a wallflower at a prom.  It was almost embarrassing.

Bryan and I were discussing the merits of this laptop when an older couple happened to decide on the same one, and asked the salesman to fetch one for them from the warehouse.  “Hey, you know what?” I said to him.  “Make that two of them.”  The couple, who looked like the kind of rural Oregonians whose kids call them “Ma” and “Pa,” looked at us in surprise.  I said, “You guys look like you know what you’re doing, so if this PC is good enough for you, well, it’s good enough for me.”  The woman demurred, saying, “Well, my husband chose it, and he doesn’t know that much,” but I think they were both pretty chuffed.  See?  Wherever I go, I try to spread joy.

There was no line at the point of sale.  I asked the cashier how sales were, and he said, “Been here since midnight.”  I thought that was a pretty safe response—upbeat, but noncommittal.  But it was pretty clear their Black Friday wasn’t going gangbusters.

How to reinvigorate Black Friday

Odd though it might seem, I may just be the perfect person to provide a strategy for making future Black Fridays more successful.  After all, it’s people like me who, by staying home, ruin everything.  I have a proposal that would probably make a big difference.

My strategy is based on sexism.  If you think sexism is a bad basis for anything, I hope you’re highly outspoken about the ridiculous tradition of men watching football on Thanksgiving while the women cook.  Myself, I’m not bothered by it because convincing people to buy a lot of crap they don’t need isn’t exactly a noble enterprise to begin with.

So, where men’s purchases are concerned, I think brick-and-mortar stores need to get away from providing product information, period.  There’s just no way a low-paid clerk is going to compete with the vast troves of information provided by e-commerce sites, available to shoppers via their smartphones.  Men do like to look at products in person, and heft them, but that’s about all the extra info they need.  So don’t waste money on clerks who can’t help with products that basically sell themselves.  (Oddly, Best Buy actually hampered this process, by locking down the configuration of their display computers so shoppers like my brother and me couldn’t glean info about the PC from the PC itself.)

Purveyors of hi-tech stuff should take the money they save through these workforce reductions and put it toward free manicures on Black Friday.  That way, women will actually encourage their men to take them shopping at places like Best Buy, and the men will have as long as they want to play with the computers and such.  And when it’s time for the man to spend more than he and his significant other had agreed on, at least she’ll be in a good mood.   (And yes, he will be buying stuff for himself, as opposed to buying gifts like he’s supposed to.  This behavior is established fact.)

The real Black Friday players should be clothing stores; they have the edge over e-commerce websites to begin with, since nobody buys clothing without petting it first and trying it on.  These stores should run a one-day promotion where every men’s garment purchased automatically adds value—say, 20% of the purchase amount—to a gift card that only his significant other can use, and only on a later visit.

Why would this be successful?  Well, women normally like to shop for clothes without their men around.  That way they avoid his scrutiny—“What?!  Eighty bucks for a t-shirt?!”—and don’t feel rushed.  Men, meanwhile, seldom shop for clothes at all, not just because clothes are boring but because of the male’s deep-seated fear that he’ll get disoriented and end up browsing in the women’s section by mistake.  The gift card would incentivize women to take their men clothing shopping for a change.  The man will be more confident with his selection if she likes it, and once he’s bored he’ll readily buy pretty much whatever she tells him to, just to get the whole thing over with.  Imagine a Black Friday where foot traffic is not only increased, in these Cyber-Monday-proof environments, but where purchases are consummated boldly and swiftly, with zero need for extra salespeople.

I’m not just guessing about all this!  My own track record proves this approach would work.  I’ve only been clothing shopping twice this year, and both times it was at my wife’s urging.  Both times, I bought stuff on the sole basis of her liking it.  Both times, I feel I greatly overpaid.  In terms of the health of our economy, all this is good news.  After all, a defeat for the likes of me is a big win for the Retail Industrial Complex!

Down With Convenience!

Introduction

“I appreciate the seamless ease….”

That statement is the inspiration for this post.  It’s from a letter a friend wrote me recently.  The point isn’t that he sounds like a TV ad (from the days when ad spokesmen were earnest instead of arch). The point, rather, is that I found this simple statement oddly inflammatory.  I asked myself why.  And the answer is, I should find it inflammatory, and so should you.  Ideally, all my friends would join me in mounting a War on Convenience.  If I can’t have that, well, maybe I can influence a few readers.

A paradox

Of course I was being bombastic and hyperbolic a second ago.  Who doesn’t want convenience in his life?  But I think convenience is like alcohol:  it should be enjoyed responsibly.

Paradoxically, my worldview straddles two seemingly conflicting ideals:  I’m a great lover of efficiency, but I bristle at society’s infatuation with ease and expedience.  “Wait,” you may ask, “aren’t efficiency and convenience pretty much the same thing?”

Nope.  When I say “efficient” I mean that I can get something done exactly how I want it done in as little time as possible.  (Often this involves doing a lot of work up front, like creating macros for a software application.)  When people talk about seamless ease, they’re often referring to systems that are merely intuitive, such as a user interface that can be grasped quickly, without any need for help menus or a manual.  Some products are convenient because they remove tedious steps; other products are convenient because they rescue you from having to learn something.

I think it’s widely assumed that where user interfaces go, intuitive is best.  But this isn’t always true.  Consider the computer keyboard:  to be maximally intuitive, its keys ought to be placed in alphabetical order.  That would make it easier for the first-time user, wouldn’t it?  But of course this idea seems silly, since typing efficiency is more important than making the keyboard layout straightforward for the newcomer.

What’s even sillier is that the QWERTY layout was actually designed to be maximally inefficient, to keep early typewriters from jamming.  The Dvorak layout I use was difficult to learn, but my long-term gains in efficiency were well worth the trouble.

Low-lying fruit

The simplest argument against the embrace of convenience is that it often requires us to forsake quality.  I give you microwave popcorn:  it’s certainly easy to make, but a) it literally stinks, b) it’s more expensive than traditional popcorn, c) it tastes pretty bad, d) it’s full of salt and fat, e) it’s full of chemicals, and f) the excessive packaging is bad for the environment.  The popularity of microwave popcorn makes me embarrassed to be a member of the human race, considering that an air popper is also extremely easy to use, and cheaper, and lets you control how much salt and butter you add.

Whipped cream in an aerosol can is also really convenient, but it’s more expensive and less tasty than what you whip at home, and has the added problem of unpredictability:  it’s hard to tell when the can is low on cream (or non-dairy “kreme” as it often is), so you never know when you’ll foul up your sundae with the liquid dribble that comes at the end.  By whipping my own cream, I can choose an organic product; whip only as much as I need; control the amount of sugar; and save money.

But enough of these convenient examples.  I want to get into the more subtle ways that, through our love of convenience, we sell ourselves short without even realizing it.

The problem of control

Often, complicated systems are made more intuitive, and sometimes more efficient, through a simplification of the user interface and/or automation of repetitive operations.  A little Cessna surely has a simpler interface than a commercial airliner, though it often lacks that handy autopilot feature.

Automation is a fine idea in theory, but in practice, it’s only as good as its execution.  How accurate are product developers’ guesses about what should be automated and how?

Well, here’s a horror story.  My family was visiting some friends in their lovely, sunny home in London.  One afternoon, when our friends were out, I thought, hey, my mother-in-law is always asking for a nice photo of my wife and me.  And here we had this great lighting, so I suggested to my wife that we finally take the time to shoot a nice photo together.  My wife has a tendency to close her eyes in photos, so it took us at least a dozen tries.  Well, on the last day of our visit, our host said, “Hey, why not give us some photos of your visit from your SD card?”  Great idea!  So I took the card up to their Mac and stuck it in the card reader, expecting that I could cherry-pick the best photos of both families.  But to my surprise the operating system seized control, copied every photo off the card, and launched a little slide show, set to music.  This might have seemed really helpful to a novice computer user who hadn’t mastered file management software, but I was appalled.  The software must have chosen to show the pictures in reverse chronological order, because the first two dozen shots were of my wife and me.  We came off looking like the biggest narcissists you’ve ever seen.

Probably there’s a way to tell the Mac not to automatically grab all the photos from an SD card.  But some systems don’t give us a choice.  We consumers often put up with this lack of control because we enjoy the convenience of the overall product.  I see this problem most frequently in Internet-based systems, particularly when the revenue model is more complicated than “you pay me directly for goods or services.”  Things are automated with more than just the user’s experience in mind.

Here’s an example:  the Gmail Adsense engine, which automatically produces custom ads based on my e-mail text, doesn’t exist to serve me.  Were I given the choice to opt out of Adsense, I certainly would.  I don’t even use Gmail, and yet (as detailed here) my e-mails to Gmail users nevertheless produce these tailored ads I like it or not.

But you know what’s even worse than that?  It’s when we’re unaware of how convenience is costing us.  Consider LinkedIn:  it’s very convenient, and a great idea, and I’m glad that it’s free.  But as I’ve only recently discovered, LinkedIn does what it pleases with the information I give it.  Awhile back, because my profile photo was like five years old, I put up a new one.  (The idea was anti-vanity:  I didn’t want people to think I was using an old photo just to look younger to the world.)  To my embarrassment, LinkedIn contacted my 400 contacts on my behalf:  “Dana Albert has a new profile picture!”  As in, “Dana Albert, devoted curator of his own image and his self-important notion of an Albert ‘brand,’ wants you to see his latest self-portrait!”  A few people responded, perhaps snidely, “Nice picture!”  How embarrassing.  (Yes, I am easily embarrassed.  What can I say … I’m an introvert.)

But that’s not all.  I’ve come to find out that LinkedIn evidently does something special for their newer users:  they send an update anytime one of the user’s contacts has made new connections.  Since I don’t get such updates, I’d never have known about this behavior, except a couple of friends commented.  (“Wow, I’ve see a lot of LinkedIn updates on you lately … did you lose your job or something?”)  Once I looked into it, I figured out how to change these settings, but it wasn’t easy—which means that those who thrive on convenience will probably just accept the default behavior.  (Surely I don’t need to go into the various ways Facebook has surreptitiously exploited their users’ tastes, preferences, and purchasing data.)

Are your choices my business?

“Fine,” you might say, “Go whip your own cream, and type on your weird keyboard, and shun Facebook, if that’s what floats your boat—but let me do as I please.”  In other words, you might wonder why your behavior is any business of mine.  Here’s why:  other people’s behavior often affects what choices are available to me.

Here’s how that happens.  Because I worship efficiency, I enjoy figuring out how to make a complicated process go quickly—but not everybody enjoys this process, and manufacturers know it.  New products are often targeted at teens and young adults (to build brand loyalty early), so new consumers’ habits can have an immediate influence on industry.  Streamlining a process, modern consumers believe, should be figured out by the manufacturer and baked into the product.  Thus, the focus is outward on the product, rather than inward on the user.  It’s not “How can I get better at this” but “How can this be better for me?”  The “smarter” our products get, the lazier we’re permitted to be.

(Fortunately, schools are still essentially old-school.  If it weren’t for teachers making kids learn math, do you think these kids would bother, given the ease-of-use of smartphone calculator apps?  And yet, once you’ve learned arithmetic, it’s faster to do it in your head.)

The result of this consumer/producer dynamic is that perfectly valid products are often kicked to the curb.  Consider the manual car transmission, aka stick shift:  is it straightforward?  Not very.  Is there a benefit to learning how to work a clutch?  I think so.  After all, a manual transmission offers better gas mileage, and enables me to roll-start the car if my battery is dead.  My mastery of manual shifting impresses the ladies, and enables me to rent a car in Europe.  The popularity, in this country, of automatic transmissions didn’t used to affect me, until that choice became so ubiquitous that some foreign car companies stopped exporting their stick-shift models here.  When I bought my last Volvo, I couldn’t get one with the transmission I wanted.  I had to settle for an automatic. 

(By the way, that bit about impressing the ladies?  Yeah, that was a joke.  Just seeing if you’re awake.)

Another example:  digital cameras.  What a great invention, and yet the camera industry is really suffering.  You know what the number one camera is today?  The iPhone.  It’s easy to see why:  you’re carrying your phone anyway, so why carry another device?  The problem is, phone cameras are not nearly as good as regular digital cameras—even the more humble point-and-shoot ones.  A phone camera takes inferior pictures because the lens is too small and doesn’t let in enough light for non-flash photography in low-light conditions.  Phone cameras also lack a zoom (their so-called “digital zoom” is pure malarkey—cropping masquerading as telephoto).

Look at these two photos.  The first was taken with a $200 Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot camera.  The second was with a Motorola Droid phone of the same vintage. 

The point-and-shoot photo is much better, and not because I got out a light meter, set the F-stop, adjusted the shutter speed, etc.  It was as easy to snap as with the phone (easier, actually, because there’s way less delay at the controls).  The only convenience I gave up was having everything in one device.

If the camera industry were healthier, I’d have even better products available to me, and at lower prices (due to economies of scale).  Alas, the market for standalone cameras has been strangled by the ubiquity of camera phones—the more convenient choice.

Whom does convenience benefit the most?

Sometimes the person who seems like the most direct beneficiary of convenience-oriented technologies actually isn’t.  Consider the grocery store UPC reader:  it’s very intuitive, and thus perfect for bringing new cashiers up to speed quickly.  It’s also more efficient, but this benefit does not accrue to the cashier, who is paid by the hour.  The system’s efficiency doesn’t mean the cashier gets a raise; it means he or she is easier to replace, and the store can get by with fewer checkout stations.

Now let’s move beyond human consumers and consider other consumers, like cattle.  Being kept in a small stall in a feedlot is certainly convenient for the cow, in terms of her basic need for sustenance.  Of course this diet causes all kinds of trouble for the poor animal, but her well-being was never the point.  The convenience of the feedlot mainly benefits the meat packer.  Since this arrangement translates into lowered operating costs, which can be passed along to the human consumer, it looks like a win-win.  So it is with cheap, high-margin products like soft drinks and sugary cereal.  Needless to say, in the long term this convenience isn’t benefiting the human consumers, either.  The countless Americans who buy junk food and frequent fast food chains are basically backing in to their own feedlot stalls.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies grasp that there’s big money to be made in drugs that treat lifestyle ailments, and doctors prescribe these drugs because doing so is so much easier than trying to get people to exercise and eat well.  Consumers participate in this lowest-price, lowest-effort economic model without an appreciation for its real costs.  The companies at the top in this economy are the direct beneficiaries of our rampant convenience addiction; by indulging it, they introduce a variety of societal ills.  In this regard, convenience is like secondhand smoke.

Convenience and parenting

If you’re a parent who has made it this far into my essay, I doubt you’re the kind who feeds his kid soft drinks, sugary cereal, and fast food.  But addiction to convenience is also present in the most upscale of products.  I’m talking about PCs, smartphones, tablet computers, and Netflix.

It’s more convenient to park kids in front of the TV or PC than to try to get them to help with dinner or with setting the table.  It’s easier to let a kid use his iPad in a restaurant, while his food gets cold, than to teach him how to behave like a grown-up.  So kids and their parents become co-dependents in a family dynamic that ultimately favors no one.

I won’t lie and say I never give in to such temptations.  But when I do, I don’t pretend I’m being a good dad.  “Shall we sit our kids down in front of a video and let them rot their brains out, just to get them out of our hair?” I’ll ask my wife.  And I’ll say to my kids, “Would you like to put in a video and let your brain be automatically extracted?”  This raises awareness and may help us fend off bad habits.

Do modern kids have the mental space required to daydream?  I’d guess a lot of them don’t.  So when my kids complain that they’re bored, I say, “Good.  It’s good to be bored.”  Necessity being the mother of invention, boredom is a good problem for the mind to solve.  Solving this problem with a library book, a blank piece of paper, or some random household detritus doesn’t do much for the economy, but the economy is not my problem.

“But wait,” you may protest, “Computers can be very educational!”  Yes, they can, but that doesn’t mean just any computer-based activity is intrinsically useful.  Too many parents pretend their Internet-addicted kid might become the next Mark Zuckerberg—because this fiction is more convenient than fighting with the kid about limits on his or her screen time.

My wife and I are all about limits.  This is why we don’t have cable, our kids don’t have phones or tablets, and their PC time is closely monitored and rationed.

“Okay, fine,” you might say, “You’ve identified some troublesome trends, but how are the habits of other families any of your business?”  Well, where the hell are my daughters going to find husbands?  My kids won’t settle for a passive, inert, pasty, video-addled mouth-breather who doesn’t read.  Meanwhile, the boys out there won’t settle for out-of-touch, pop-culturally illiterate nerds who don’t even text.  Sure, there are some boys out there whose parents are just as socially unconventional as my wife and me, but it’s a small pool.

Call to action

If you disagree with all of this, that’s fine—and I thank you for at least reading it.

On the other hand, if you agree with me, you may wonder what I propose to do about this rampant convenience addiction.  The answer is simple (though not easy).  Next time you appreciate the convenience of something, ask yourself if that convenience came at any great cost to you:  to your privacy, to your health, to your family, or to the environment.  Then ask yourself if it’s worth it.  I’ll keep on doing the same.

And at a minimum, if you find yourself using the phrase “seamless ease,” please don’t say it like it’s a good thing.

From the Archives - I Enter the Computer Age

Introduction

A whole lot of what I wrote in college now embarrasses me, due to its poor quality. (I’m glad it didn’t embarrass me then, or I’d never have written anything, and I’m glad that what I’m writing now doesn’t yet embarrass me.) But some stuff gains in value over time because it captures a real-time personal response to the culture of the day. This is particularly handy when the culture in question has changed radically.

In 1989, personal computers didn’t do much other than creating documents. Nothing was networked. Computers were only a social tool if you widely shared those documents and got a lot of feedback about them. I did the first half of this—writing essays I thought my friends and family would enjoy, and mailing around photocopies—but of course I almost never heard anything back. It was a bit like blogging, but to a small actual audience instead of a practically infinite hypothetical one.

This essay captures the state of personal computing in 1989 as viewed through my young eyes. I think this may be the only essay you’ll find that talks about fax machines as a cool technology, rather than as outdated old crap. (Disclaimer: in this essay I cast aspersions on Apple computers. Forgive me. I was young and foolish, and I thought DOS prompts were pretty cool, and anyway I couldn’t afford a new computer.)



I Enter the Computer Age - November 9, 1989

I have entered the computer age: an age of processing and transferring information in ways never before possible. The question is, is today’s information really worth the new and improved technology?

We could either assume it is, or else take the really cynical view that our information has never amounted to a hill of beans anyway so we might as well transfer it as quickly and as slickly as possible. Heck, if you’ve got nothing to say, you can at least fire it across the nation at a million miles per second, so maybe it comes out on a fax machine.

Ooh, fax. I hit a nerve there, huh? It’s the cool, groovy new way to say, “Hey, I’m hip, I’m hop, I’m a digitally connected happenin’ type of guy. Yo, babe, let’s do lunch. I’ll fax you three martinis and a rice cake.” Okay, I don’t have a fax machine, but some of you out there know I was faxing all the way back when a transcriber was called a Dictaphone. Fax is nothing new to me.

But what are people faxing now? Charts? Yeah, that’s it. “Here, I’ve made a pie chart of how my day is divided up.” How could I use a fax machine? My writing isn’t timely enough to warrant being sent out to waiting hands in half a microsecond.

Phones: now there’s a rapid data transfer we can all use. It’s just a matter of knowing how to master the technology. I’m all over that game like a cheap suit. Not only do I have a GTE calling card, but I’ve got an AT&T card. (These days, it’s a kind of status to have as many magnetic‑strip‑bearing cards in your wallet as possible. I’ve got five, and two UPC‑code cards which can be read by computer laser. I’m trying to get up the guts to ask myself for an autograph.) I can call anywhere from a block away to the other side of the world—and I can even choose the company that gets my money! So what if I can’t afford long distance?

But wait, this phone thing gets even better. The other day, I was at the library and I decided to see if a certain someone had called my apartment and left a message on my phone answering machine. I cruised to the nearest phone booth and entered my super‑special secret calling card code so I wouldn’t have to deposit a quarter like all those mere mortals. Had I chosen to use the Toll‑Saver function on my machine, I would have known after only one ring whether or not there was a message. After four rings I got my machine. My outgoing message is worse than I thought—but we’re a high-tech nation, we all know how to leave a message anyway. After my outgoing message was over, I entered another secret code to play back my messages. Had there been any, I could have saved them with the push of a button.

Okay, I guess you probably caught that: there weren’t any messages. Oh well, at least I verified my fluency with the latest technological wonders. “But wait a second,” I could ask myself, “what good does all that technology do if I still don’t get any messages?” Aw, hell, let’s not answer that. I’m having fun here.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Where do I sign up?” Yeah, you want in on this. You, too, want to be a master in the art of manipulating little digital bits and bytes, wielding electronic data like a Greek god hurling lightning bolts. Well don’t worry, there are companies out there that specialize in quenching the little man’s thirst for digital glory.

Apple has jumped on this one. As if “Macintosh” weren’t bad enough, now everybody is past the first name basis and calls them “Macs.” And these computers have gained widespread praise. Why? Does this reflect some cool new technology? Can they do the phase‑lock‑loop in 0.027 microseconds? Does the new 80‑86 Hyper‑Detonator Processor put you in direct contact with a higher order of electronic entity?

Of course not. They’re popular for the same reason as Care Bears and Suzuki Samurais: they’re cute, and they’re fun. Oh, look at this cute little keyboard! And this here, this is called a mouse. Just aim and point! Oh! Look at that precious little screen! There’s even a garbage can to dump your unneeded files into. It’s spiffy!

Okay, I’ll concede that the Mac has some legitimate boons. Yeah, it can graph anything, right on the page, so when you write your research paper on Homer’s “The Iliad” you can graph Achilles’ daily rate of slaughter as compared to Hector’s to truly illustrate his dominance on the battlefield. Of course, for this you’ll need a $5,000 laser printer, unless you want to fight for the one in the Microcomputer Lab on campus. (I got cold feet about that place after I jammed theirs.) Most of you will settle for a cheesy dot‑matrix printer, which is all you’ll be able to afford after blowing your whole savings on MacCool and MacStatus.

But now you’re going to protest: “The Mac is user‑friendly!” Yes, just like a picture book. Nothing seems very complex anymore when the computer draws a smiley face to indicate that you’ve logged on correctly, and makes a little picture of a watch instead of making you decipher the word “Wait” like I have to do. And then there’s that nifty mouse. You can move your cursor anywhere just by leaving the home row to grab the little mouse and drag it across your desk, eventually running off the end (at least if your desk is as small as mine) so that you can simply pick the mouse up, move it, set it down again, and keep dragging. It’s so simple, so uncomplicated. Heck, I had to memorize about five hundred control-characters sequences instead. So what if now I can instantly place my cursor anywhere in the document without interrupting my typing? It’s too hard, it’s not worth it! I’d rather be spoon‑fed, even if it will cost me hours in mousing around in the future.

I’ve got one big beef with the Big Mac. It eats your files. A document you were working on is suddenly destroyed.  You don’t just lose your changes—the entire file is corrupted and thus lost forever.  I know, I know, that’s just the software, the machine really had nothing to do with it. I’ve heard this a million times. But what are you supposed to do, write your own foolproof software? If you can’t get reliable software for your hardware, what good is it? I think those who rush to the Mac’s defense must be the ones who haven’t seen it draw a little bomb on the screen to accompany an error message that is one version or another of “You’re doomed!”  How did this come about? Some software engineer told his boss, “There’s a glitch in our software that eats files. What should I do?” His boss must have said, “Deal with it,” so the guy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, if we’re gonna destroy people’s documents, we might as well be cute about it. After all, we are user‑friendly!”



My computer is more mature, more direct. Today I was screwing around, trying to make the computer do something it clearly didn’t want to do. (Don’t worry, I was using an unimportant document—a letter to an insurance company.) It kept saying, “Disc Failure in Drive B: Abort, Retry, Ignore?” and I kept saying, “Ignore!” until finally it got sick of me and said, “*** FATAL ERROR F27.” I like that. Cold, impersonal, digital. Just like a computer should be. You want personality? You want warmth? You want something truly expressive? That’s up to the person using the computer.

Uh, wait a second. On second thought, who uses these computers? What do they really have to say? On second thought, maybe we ought to go ahead and use the Mac. Yeah, get some of those graphs in here. Dress it up, make it slick. As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the massage.” Not “message” (although he said that, too) but “massage.” Think about it.