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On the other hand, computers have also allowed the geek to inherit the earth and infest the English language with gobbledygook. They have caused well-meaning people to be dragged to the keyboard and bombarded with meaningless, crazily punctuated messages until technophobia is induced and sufferer are are cast out to the fringes to be pointed at and ridiculed.
Powerless, they are like the man in the old joke whose psychiatrist gave him a Rorschach test, showing him abstract shapes and asking what they meant to him. Each time, the patient answered "sex". At the end of the session the psychiatrist diagnosed: "I'm afraid you're a sex maniac." "Sex maniac? Me? Who's been drawing the rude pictures?" the patient demanded. As well as trying to penetrate the thought processes of the downy cheeked programmer, the poor computer user is expected to know how to assemble a product that is frequently sold without essential attributes, such as cables, keyboards and printers. Imagine this happening in any other industry. "Can I interest you in this powerful Mini Rover, does 0 to 170 in half a second, 40,000cc, power assisted cam shaft, fuel injection dip stick, very competitive at only 34,000? Wheels are extra, I'm afraid, and we don't have the steering column you need in stock right now. Perhaps you'd like to consider this very handy piece of software that will turn it into a tricycle?"
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Now a book by Thomas Landauer called "The Trouble with Computers" reveals that computers aren't even as useful as everyone thought. Apparently, the more computers a company has, the more it spends on support and training, and the more time it loses through systems not working and office workers being distracted from their duties by game playing, flirting with online strangers and getting hopelessly lost on the Web.