Is it the nature of being computer people that makes us frustrated by real world inanimate objects’ refusal to do what we ask of them and means we are also the only people in the world that actually know how to follow instructions and put things like furniture or toys together?

I know Jono feels like this. Ask him about having to move his cooker with the broken door that refused to stay closed when he was moving house.

Inanimate objects drive me to distraction. They’re sooooo fucking stupid. I think this might be to do with the fact that I spend all day interacting with an idealised abstraction of a real world environment which behaves in the same way all the time. You can’t drop something on the floor when you remove the item that was on top of it from the fridge when you’re using a computerised environment, that kind of clumsiness is already taken care of for you. If this were going to happen, you would probably get a nice little warning message asking if you really want to drop the chicken on the floor, or leave it in the fridge. I believe Jono calls such idiotic objects ‘infidels’.

I also thought over Christmas that I was the only person in my house that knows how to follow assembly instructions for new furniture or my neice’s toys. My mum just gives up at the point electricity becomes involved, especially when she has to unplug something to plug the new thing in. Not for her to follow cables to see where they go, no. My dad is pretty good at putting stuff together but he is easily misled. I seem to be the only one who can do stuff like this without getting confused. I wonder whether this is also to do with my computerised existence. I spend a lot of time reading howtos, man pages, walkthroughs and so on.

Are we living in an overly perfected world that makes real life frustrating?