My Laptop Bluescreened While I Was Trying to Think of a Title

"Wait a minute," you say. "Aren't you, like, a computer programmer?"

Ok, first of all, I'm a software developer. "Computer programmer" is a term left over from when computers were the size of a Greyhound bus and packed as much computing power as your curling iron. "Computer programmers" were people who huddled in a dark room feeding punchcards to a giant steel behemoth made of spinning dynamos and vacuum tubes. If they were lucky, the programmers might be able to get the computer to beep or calculate half of 6, but in general they considered it a good day if the computer didn't go on a killing rampage and eat them.

Most people know that the first "bugs" in computers were literally bugs: Moths or whatever would get into the circuits and screw things up. Imagine how big a computer has to be for a moth to be able to get into the workings of the machine and cause 1 + 1 to intermittently equal 7. That's a big freaking computer. The very first computers were so gigantic, in fact, that computational errors were often blamed on stray cats stuck in the gears.

Ok, I made that last part up. It actually wasn't until the mid 90s that computers needed to be safeguarded against the threat of strange p*ssies.

The point is that when the term "computer programmer" originated, computers were nothing like they are now. Computers have gotten so much more powerful, more complicated, and more likely to be used by complete morons that the field of computer science, like human society in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, has fragmented into two completely distinct professions.

As you'll recall, Wells envisioned that in the future humanity would schism into two separate races -- and no, one of those races is not the one that thinks it's ok to use the word schism as a verb. The two races were the Morlocks, who were dark brutish creatures who lived underground and controlled the mysterious machinery that ran everything; and the Eloi, who were gentle, beautiful and vapid creatures who probably thought that Wal-Mart was a place to get "wall stuff."

In this analogy, the creepy guy who smells like Doritos and laughs at you because you tried to connect your printer with an RS-232 interface cable is a Morlock. He knows how all the hardware works. He knows the difference between Cat5 and Cat6, and no, it's notCat1. He knows whether his hard drive is SCSI or ATAPI, how much hard drive space he has down to the kilobyte, and whether he's going to need to dump the odd-numbered Star Trek movies to make room for the final season of Battlestar Galactica.

The software developers, on the other hand, are Eloi. They are beautiful, delicate creatures who use words like "elegant" to describe 300 lines of what, to any normal person, looks like the result of someone typing with his keyboard upside down. They can tell you the difference between a runtime error, a syntax error and a logic error, and may attempt to regale you with an account of the time that they crashed a production web server with an infinitely recursive Java function. A computer is to a software developer what a phone is to someone calling a 976 number: It allows him to do what he wants to do, but it's hard not to think of it as a somewhat limiting medium.

Roughly speaking, the Morlocks are the hardware guys and the Eloi are the software guys*, and there exists an uneasy symbiotic relationship between the two. The Eloi rely on the Morlocks to keep the machines running, and the Morlocks rely on the Eloi to make the machines actually do something other than beep or calculate half of 6.

As an Eloi, I resent my reliance on both the Morlocks and their crude machines. I feel about my laptop the same way I feel about my car: It takes me cool places and lets me do all kinds of fun things, but I don't give a crap how it works. I'm pretty sure both of them involve a wheel and some gerbils. When something breaks, I open up the hood, tug on a few wires, and then take the damn thing in to a Morlock, who might have a chance in hell of fixing it.**

I hate it when people come to me with computer problems. Not software problems, mind you. I don't mind answering questions about Blogger templates or XML feeds. But calling me when your motherboard is fried is like calling up your brother-in-law the architect when your plumbing is clogged. Sure, he might know the answer, but at best he's going to resent you for coming to him regarding such a plebeian matter, and at worst he's going to flood your house with sewage. For architects, sewage exists only as an abstract concept, something to be routed away from the house by some decisive lines on a sheet of paper. That's not going to help you when your basement smells like the wool seat covers in Britney Spears' convertible after a three day rain.

The other day my sister-in-law asked me for advice on buying a laptop. I gave her the same advice I give everybody who is buying a computer: All of the numbers should be big except for the price. That's as detailed as my hardware knowledge gets. If one PC had herpes simplex 2 and another had herpes simplex 5, I'd go with the 5.

The only other advice I have is this: for the love of all that's holy, buy the extended warranty. Extended warranties are the equivalent of the Geneva Convention treaties in the eternal enmity between Morlocks and the rest of humanity. Sure, you're going to get screwed, but you'll know exactly how badly you're getting screwed and for how long.

Plus, you won't have to call me and bother me while I'm dancing and singing with the rest of the Eloi, trying to ignore those ominous rumblings underground.

*I use the term "guys" because, well, I've never actually seen any women in either of these fields.

**These days, of course, there is an alternative to fixing your computer. It's called "USB ports." USB ports allow lazy, non-hardware oriented people to just plug in a new whatever-it-is when the old whatever-it-is inside the box stops working. I've got so many USB devices plugged into my laptop now that I actually have a USB splitter velcro'd to the lid of my laptop, with all kinds of gizmos and dohickeys sticking out of it. When software people see this, they say, "Wow, that's cool!" When hardware people see this, they say, "What the f--- is wrong with your laptop?"