The Mouse Click
The other day, I watched while someone got furious about the fact that it took two mouse clicks to do something that they used to do in one. She was absolutely livid about it – actually yelling and cursing. The function was printing multiple copies of a document and the person so adversely affected by this horrendous miscarriage of computer science was an elderly woman. A woman, that in my mind, should’ve been able to remember what it took to create multiple copies of a document in the days of the manual typewriter. I learned how to type on one of those monstrosities in high school and let me tell you, it was no picnic in pajamas.
All that click, click, clack, clack. “Push for speed. Don’t worry about the errors, push for speed!” The instructor would bark throughout the room as she patrolled back and forth like an upstanding member of the Nazi SS.
But still, a manual typewriter would have been a virtual god send to those monks that sat for eighteen hours at a time and transcribed documents with one of those quill things. I can just see the poor guy all hunched over one of those big wooden tables at about ten at night: “Hey, hold up Father Urethra . . . there’s been a slight change at the bottom of page six . . .”
And what about those stone tablets! What did you use for white out in those days? Portland cement?
“Yea Bob, I need ten copies of the annual sales slab by eight tomorrow morning . . . and oh, by the way, I need it in color.”
This might have been the guy that figured out you can write on dried animal skins with a stick of charcoal. You can even go so far as to cut the dried animal skins into little rectangles and put them together into a tablet using a little tree sap at the top. Now you’ve got yourself a dandy little tablet of sticky cowhide for taking notes at the elk lodge on Friday nights.
What have we degenerated into in this fast paced, can’t wait, I-need-it-five-minutes-ago society of ours?
I really don’t think that we’re in possession of the technology required to measure the human energy expended in the course of one mouse click! How many billionths of a calorie would that be? How many mouse clicks would it take to drop one pound of fat? I’m not sure, but I think we’re up into the number of stars in the known universe kind of numbers here.
How many mouse clicks would it take to power New York city for a day? How about just a standard one hundred watt light bulb? (you get the idea . . .)
I say it’s time for everyone to slow down long enough to get just a tiny little bit of perspective.
Come on lady, it’s a mouse click.