This month is my career anniversary. On September 15, 1997, I left behind the world of political science and embarked on a new job adventure in the lucrative and exciting field of high-tech. That my salary has doubled in the ensuing sixteen years is more a tribute to inflation and how little I was raking in at the beginning. And the enthusiasm of those early days (in which I commented to some unwitting Iowa undergrads in email that my job was “as simple, easy and rewarding as picking up free money in the street”) has long, long, long since gone by the boards.
Sixteen years, man and boy, as the Cockneys say. In theory and on paper, I should be halfway to retirement. But the notion that I’ll get to retire before 60 is risible in the extreme, things being how they are. That’s another post. This is more about what happened in those sixteen years. When I started, my company had Ethernet, Token Ring and LocalTalk all in use, and whether you could get onto the Internet or whether your Mac could print was a function of what floor of the building you were on. There was actually a modem pool so you could connect over the network to a 56K modem and dial into Erols or Heller or whoever was your ISP.* (And I had to do this, because at the time, the firewall blocked IMAP.) We had Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT 4, Novell-based file and print services (at a time when FAPS wasn’t as giggle-inducing as now), and the phone in my pocket was a Motorola Piper that I couldn’t afford to turn on.
Things have changed a lot. Apple stopped dying and took over the world in some non-PC markets that didn’t exist back then. Nowadays it’s all Ethernet connection, except when it’s all Wi-Fi. I literally cannot remember the last time I had to use a model to dial in, but it must’ve been a while, because I don’t remember when I last had a computer with a modem built in. The vast array of Zip disks, Jaz disks, and even CD-RW went by the boards in favor of USB thumb drives – when physical media was used at all, that is. I can’t remember the last time I had to use a DVD to install software, but extrapolating back I can only assume it was to install OS X 10.6. Setting up printers remains as annoying and ignominious as task as ever, but the vast majority of my support tasks can be handled remotely. The landscape of IT support, in short, should be completely transformed.
And yet.
I was having a conversation with my boss, who independently gave voice to something I’d been thinking for quite some time. Generation X has by and large spent its entire office career working on computers. Millenials don’t know anything else. The baby boomers – the last generation to know routine office life without a PC on every desk – are starting to retire. In theory and on paper, then, IT support should be trending away from “how do I do that” and more exclusively focused on “this doesn’t work,” because the user base as a while should have become more computer-literate and adept at handling the machine.
And yet. The boss concurred completely: this hasn’t happened. The new crop of users produces no fewer ridiculous questions, no less fodder for the Twitters and blogs and websites detailing the follies of help desk callers. So if it hasn’t gotten any better – why the hell not?
My theory was this: as with most things in the tech world, the blame belongs to Microsoft. Windows was a mess until the release of Windows 95 – and then it was a slightly fancier-looking mess. But all the old DOS problems remained and new and exciting ones were developed; Win98 was a kludge and WinME a disaster area. Not until Windows 7 were the more robust NT underpinnings available at the consumer level – and by that time, the forced integration of Internet Explorer (as part of Microsoft’s effort to fend off the Netscape challenge) had opened the way to a whole new world of viruses and malware, made worse by the proliferation of peer-to-peer file sharing and high-speed home networks.
In short, Windows kinda sucked. And it continued to kinda suck. People rebooted every day whether they needed it or not, and some folks prescribed a full OS reinstall every six months just to try to speed things back up. Entire businesses grew up around consumer IT support – the Dell technician on the other end of a phone line in Hyderabad, the stereotype-bedecked Geek Squad at Best Buy – and people just accepted that the computer did weird things, bad things, performed poorly or oddly, and it was beyond their control.
It’s pre-Enlightenment religion, is what it is. You don’t know why your child is coughing and can’t stand up, you don’t know why the crop is withering brown in the middle of the season, you don’t understand why the sun is suddenly being covered in the middle of the day – and so you run to the village shaman or medicine man or whatever, and he sacrifices a chicken or something, and suddenly the sun comes back out or the kid gets healthy or, more likely, it goes on being shitty…and that’s just the way of the world.
Windows gave the computing public learned helplessness. People just accepted that the computer was beyond their comprehension, and gave up trying to understand or solve it. Better to let the computer wizard do it, or the computer guru, or the computer magician – even the terminology suggests a primitive tribe throwing itself on the mercy of the supernatural. And IT departments gladly indulged the peasants. Maybe out of a need to get more budget, maybe out of a need to feed their own egos, whatever. Personally, I think they did it because they wanted to guarantee that when sacrifice time came around, the peasants would look upon them as the priests…and not the chickens.
* I had the good fortune to have used two small business for my Internet access for a continuous stretch of about 13 years: Heller for dialup and Speakeasy for DSL. Both are outstanding, and dearly missed.