It may be considered perfidious for a liberal columnist to take a break from 'Establishment bashing' in these days of heated sentiments about relief and rehabilitation work in the mountains, government's fiscal priorities, role of the military in managing the country, defence spending and the placement of 'holding dual office' provision in a constitutional perspective. The term 'liberal' is taking on a dubious connotation in the US (shades of McCarthyism? of the sixties?) and this is beginning to echo here in Pakistan too. Criticising the government on women's rights issue or retention of theologically repressive laws can earn you that red circle around your name. I am digressing to a neutral issue this week, not merely to show that liberals can be conservative too.
People have always had awesome ability to misuse and abuse tools and technology. Quite often, we try to use a knife or a key when a screwdriver is not handy or stick naked wires in an electric outlet if the right plug is missing. The prevalent standard of technology in the country makes use of wrong tools a standard practice to which no one bats an eye. The best technicians consider it unmanly to use proper tools; they can erect sugar mills with a chisel, hammer and a pipe wrench. I was shocked to learn once that Ittefaq Foundries built sugar mills without proper engineering drawings! That is domestic workmanship for you. technology provides far more creativity of misuse and that is a global phenomenon but we, as a nation, can take it to new heights.
In the early days of PCs during the eighties, there was a landmark case in Texas against Lotus Corporation, the owners of the legendry Lotus™ spreadsheet, which revolutionised the way accountants made budgets, estimates and financial reports. A contractor submitted a tender for a large project that he had prepared on the spreadsheet. At the bottom of the list of expenses, he had inserted a row to include an item he had omitted earlier but he did not change the formula for the total to include the new row. He got the contract because it was about a million dollars lower than other bids. That is when he discovered his mistake and sued Lotus Corporation for selling a faulty product. The court ruled that it was human error on his part and not a flaw in the software. The term 'computer-induced bankruptcy' -- CIB -- came into being and has haunted financial managers ever since. Now it is customary to put counter checks into spreadsheet formulas.
I am very wary of spreadsheets because they can create alluring perfection to calculations to distance you from the real world. Everything can look so detailed and precise on the spreadsheet until you begin the real business and discover how crooked the real world is, nothing like the rows of perfectly straight cash flow projections. I have seen many a computer savvy entrepreneur go down the drain because computers don't make small mistakes, just homicidal ones. It is like taking a wrong turn while walking can make you end up in the next street but doing so in an aeroplane can land you in the wrong continent.
Computers have a lethal habit of letting you down when you most need their reliability. A printer will start jamming paper or run out of ink only when you need the document urgently within the next few minutes, otherwise they will serve you flawlessly for months. Hard disks are most perfidious. An infected or corrupted hard disk can create more tragedy than Shakespeare or Greek plays. Losing data on your hard disk is second only to loosing a job or a dear one! Such accidents I call 'computer-induced blues' and these can last from a few days to months. There is a simple precaution to such accidents called 'backups' but most users start making them only after they have suffered a tragedy.
Then there are areas where people make computers do bizarre things. One is the proliferation of what I call 'ugly documents', real eyesores. The ability of software to produce a huge variety of fonts for text tempts users to try all of them as if not using strange calligraphic fonts will be wastage of money spent on the computer. Strange looking, almost illegible fonts, underlines, shadowed and contained in unnecessary boxes produce horribly cluttered documents that hurt the eyes and make it hard to follow what is being conveyed. The other new development since the advent of text messaging on computers and cellular phones is 'computerese' language that is evolving rapidly to mutilate English language into a new kind of slang. Sentences like "Gud 2 C U", "Howz U", "luv 4m da hrt" etc. It is supposed to be chic to write with phonetic brevity of syllables. It's cute but is taxing to learn a parallel set of spellings, to say the least. I am afraid a new generation of kids may grow up using the new lexicon in corporate and diplomatic documents. I call this lingo 'computer-induced babbling'.
In the corporate and official circles, apart from chauffer driven email accounts that defeat the whole immediacy of the medium, there is the curse of the Microsoft PowerPoint™. Ever since government departments and some local companies have discovered PowerPoint, meetings have become much more insufferable. It is a powerful tool to make a graphic and verbal presentation of a complex proposal or report. The last thing it was designed for is textual information, although bullet points are useful to summarise a long discussion. What happens here is that presenters fill slides with long lines of text and read off the slide in monotonic drabness. The idea is to compliment visual information with verbal explanation. Ideally, a PowerPoint presentation should present information that requires commentary --the combination of the two adds to memory retention. Merely reading the text off the slides is boring and self-defeating.
These days, PowerPoint presentations have become as ubiquitous as mineral water bottles on the table, whereas many discussions do not require such presentation. To beat it all, most presentations do not have a detailed document behind them. They are a cryptic form of a proposal, strategy or report in themselves. It becomes an instrument for brushing over the subject matter superficially relieving any effort for drafting, reading and discussion of serious issues. According to my information, the PM has taken this trivialisation of policy making to new heights. He forbids presenters from speaking, saying he can read English and then he flips through the slides. In a way, he is right but then why allow PowerPoint presentations at all the meetings. The same information could be emailed to him and his email operator could put a hard copy on his desk for him to read. This misuse of computer slide presentation could be termed as 'computer-induced bull-droppings'.
Technology is a double-edged sword and we are very good at using the wrong ends.
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