OMGJeremy

Reader Submission Monday: Why PC’s Have Hang-ups

submitted by Doctor Sigmund Informaticus

Have you ever wondered why you have to click on Start with your mouse in order to stop a PC? Why did they design it that way? Well, the truth is that that’s the wrong question. It wasn’t designed; it just turned out that way. The computer was designed before the mouse was invented, and all this mousey, window stuff was added later, in a big hurry, in order to prevent the PC being overwhelmed by the Mac. And you still don’t need a mouse in order to do use a PC. It was designed when all you had in order to tell it what to do was a keyboard. The keyboard instructions tell us how the PC was designed to function. They reveal the psychology of the PC, because they allow us to perform association tests: type something in and you get an immediate – and therefore psychologically revealing – response.

It may surprise you that such association tests lead to the inescapable conclusion that PC hang-ups are very similar to those of humans, only structurally worse. Some of us are neurotic, some of us are control freaks, some of us are ashamed of our origins, some of us are manic depressive, some of us suffer from schizophrenia, some of us are obsessed with sex or have never quite gotten over our toilet training, but all PC’s have all of these conditions all of the time! Let me prove it to you.

Let’s start off with the toilet training. What do you type in order to print something? You’ve got it: Control P. Control pee: in other words don’t wet your pants. That’s just as much a taboo for the PC as for you. But the PC needs to be told about it every time. We don’t, it’s so ingrained that we can’t pee in our pants on command, even if we’re bursting. Have you ever tried it? The PC is different; it’s less mature than we are! But the idea is the same: anything that comes out of you is dirty, naughty naughty, something to be ashamed of, to be done only in secret, you evil little child, you! And there is so much paper coming out of the PC that it has every right to be ashamed of itself. Control P, don’t you forget it!

Trauma # 1: toilet training

Now let’s get on to the sex bit.

To start off with, the PC is afraid of exhibitionism. You can see this in the command that you type in order to copy something: Control C. Control See – that’s just to let you know that making a copy of something makes it visible in places where it couldn’t previously be seen. You must, at all time, control everything that someone else could potentially see.  Otherwise you may be caught with your pants down.

Once you have copied something, you can put into any file you want. Of course, you have to open the file first. Do you know how exciting it is to open a file? The PC does! That’s why it mentally prepares you for it. The instruction to open a file is Control O! Oooh! Yes, it’s a big, big O that you must, you absolutely must control in order to be worthy of your PC. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at how big the O is on your keyboard. Of course, if you have a Blackberry, then you only have a small O to control. It serves you right.

Once you’ve opened a file, you can copy parts of other files into it, the things that you have Control ‘C’-d. There are two commands for this. The original command was very explicit and primitive, but before we discuss it, we need to understand the origins of the PC. The PC is the child of the typewriter, but is ashamed of its descent. The typewriter is a physical, mechanical device, whereas the PC prides itself on transcending all that is physical and ascending into the realm of the symbolical. That is why the Shift key on the PC is used as sparingly as possible: it harks back to the typewriter. When you press the Shift key on the typewriter, a shaft shifts things so that the upper case letters hit the ribbon instead of the lower case ones. The words “Shift” and “Shaft” are so closely related that they are more or less interchangeable. Anybody who has ever studied Freud would know that you can’t say one without thinking the other.

Now we can get back to the original command to copy things into an open file: Shift Insert, in other words “Shaft insert.” Can it get more explicit than that?! The other command is very similar, even though it was added later because the first was too direct. What is it? Control V. True, its more subtle than Shaft I mean Shift insert, but the message is the same. It’s the V that’s the issue. That is the letter formed by a woman’s thighs when they are separated, right? That’s what you have to control, every time you insert information from another source into something that you are controlling the big O of. Got it?

Trauma # 2: sex and shame

The PC is also deeply concerned about divorce. What do you do in order to make something disappear? Control X, of course. Two keystrokes and your ex has vanished. If only life were that simple! And suppose you regret doing that, suppose you decide that you miss her after all? What do you do then? All you have to do is type Control V (or Shaft Insert) and there she is wherever and whenever you want her. Note that this only works for the last ex. Sorry, Tom Cruise.

How do you keep things from changing? Control S. Did you know that the “Es” was Freud’s term for the subconscious? The subconscious – that part of us which is incapable of rational thought, that acts according to its often nasty instincts, that cannot explain why it did what it did? The message of Control S is that the PC also has a subconscious, full of nasty desires, just waiting to catch you when you’ve made lots of brilliant changes, none of which you will ever be able to reproduce. This subconscious must be controlled, that’s what Control S is designed to do.

The standard way to stop the PC starts with typing Control Alternative Delete. Note that it is almost impossible to do this with one hand. The official reason for that is to prevent anything disastrous from happening if you fall asleep on your keyboard. The real reason is, of course, open for all of us to see in the names of the keys. If there is something Alternative – not the regular operating system, but some programme which is trying to take over your PC – if this Alternative is in Control, then its control must be deleted, the control over the PC must be taken away from it.

I suppose that you have gathered by now that the PC has this thing about Control. It is desperately neurotic about Control. The PC is a neurotic control freak. Shift it doesn’t react to very much, because it inherited that from the typewriter, remember? The PC is to the typewriter as man is to the apes.

OK, so the PC has a hang-up about toilet training and is deeply obsessed with sex, but does that lead to malfunctions as it does with humans? I can assure you, it does.

To start off with, PC’s are universally manic-depressive. When they are manic, they think they can take on the whole world. When they are depressive, even a single step is too much. The manic behaviour is very easy to activate: just type Control A and see what happens. The PC selects everything in sight! Everything! And it will apply your next command to – everything! How manic can you get? What a recipe for disaster, if your next command contains even one mistake?! Fortunately, there is a remedy. We can invoke the depressive side of the PC to reverse the last step, however big or small it was. We can type: Control Z. Yes, Z, the opposite end of the alphabet to A. Control Z! That, ladies and gentlemen, is the single key sequence which every PC user must know. Reversing the damage is always better than repairing it.

Trauma #3: tremendous mood swings

Unfortunately, PC’s are not just manic-depressive. They also suffer from schizophrenia. Change the context, even slightly, and it’s as if they have a whole new persona, and they can’t remember anything from the previous context. I’m sure you experience that with your PC’s on a daily basis.

One example of that schizophrenia concerns the function keys. Just as the Control key, they are unique to PC-psychology. There are twelve function keys. Note that we must be very careful about how to even pronounce the word, for a Freudian slip is just around the corner. That was designed that way too. And too make it even easier to confuse them, the abbreviation is the same. If you use the F-keys, sooner or later you be uttering the F-word, because it is so absolutely non-obvious and inconsistent what the F-keys do.

Let’s take one example: F4. What the F is it for, you may ask. Well, in Word, if you type something – say “Blah “ – and the hit F4, then it repeats itself, and you get “Blah Blah.” Great feature, hey! In PowerPoint, if you type F4, only the last letter is repeated. In Outlook, it asks you what you want to find.

How do you stop something? Just type Alternative F4. When you repeat yourself, think of the alternative. Yes, there is always an alternative: stopping. If you don’t know the F for what it’s for, consider the alternative to whatever the F it’s for: stopping. If you do that often enough, you stop the whole PC. Yes, that’s right, it really stops! And you don’t need two hands at once to do it, like you do with Control Alternate Delete. Isn’t that wonderful? And once you’ve stopped it, it can’t hurt you anymore! This control-freakish, neurotic, manic depressive, schizophrenic, obsessed thing can’t do you any harm! It can be turned off!

Aah, if only people were that simple!

© 2011 Doctor Sigmund Informaticus, Computer psychiatrist