LOIS GREENE STONE - BYTES DON'T BITE

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.

​                                    Bytes don’t Bite  
 
 
            I'm part of the passive era, the Silent Generation known in television land as 'happy days.' Co-eds, in single-sex dorms, were called 'girls', dress codes were never challenged, and...well, what has any of this to do with computers?   How easy do you think it is to give COMMANDS when conditioning caused a bland, obedient personality!
            No word-processor code has, in its memory, any bits from my compliant childhood;  the latter is etched in my brain's convolution remaining forever like a certain scar on my finger where a dog bit me.  At six years old, I went to pet a puppy, and got a chomp.  My desire was to yell at the animal;  instead I apologized for disturbing the dog.    
            Schoolboys threw ice balls at my bare legs showing below my skirt, and blood dripped down staining my seventh grade white socks, but I was not to take snow and smash it at them.  Girls didn't do that.  Don't make a scene.  Don't be aggressive.  Don't be vulgar.  Don't be too assertive or too competitive.  Don't be bold, outspoken...don't act like a boy.  I was a good athlete but was told not to beat boys during competition:  "pretend you aren't so capable" was a catch-phrase.
            The most brazen act I can remember is associated with my last spanking.  I refused to cry and repeated what I'd read in a magazine:  "the only reason you are hitting me, Mother, is because you've lost your wits and can't think of anything intelligent to say."
            In 1982, I took this pre-conditioned pleasing personality and put it before the first home PC that relied on commands.  I would have felt better saying 'how are you' as a salutation when it showed "hello".  As it prompted "ok", I wanted to say 'thanks'.  Why couldn't the word 'question' have been programmed into the word-processor software instead of 'command'?
            Silicon Valley South, in California, in 1983, offered counseling  for “computer widows and their mates” believing there was a "conflict between the perfect machine and the imperfect human being."  Of course the inference was that females couldn't use or understand electronic items.  Was I, then, acting like a male because my nails tapped plastic computer-powered typing keys, above which sat a necessary word-processor template?  Was that black square-faced computer screen without hair or eyes or ears or lips more perfect than human me?  I knew I could shut off its glare by depressing a red lever!
            My p.c. was not a threat to my family;  it threatened me!  It reminded me of my inadequacies in logic because I'm a feeling illogical being, made no response to irrational statements except to coolly remind me of syntax error, permitted no interaction or friendship to be set up.  It didn't require sleep, or food, or love, or sex.  It was so damn smug with aloof comments instead of criticism, and superior language that insisted I talk to it its way. 
         As my 1982 model with its double 5¼” floppies began to feel more comfortable, and the software seemed less hostile, my mate surprised me with a 1988 hard disk, 3½" floppy machine.  Familiar was replaced with foreign as I needed to understand trees, paths, roots;  but was this a computer or a garden?  What about data neatly arranged on an obsolete word processor in a disk size I'd no longer use!  Download.  Convert to ASCII.  Middle-man it with utility programs.  Text-in/out into a large modern software package that boasted of a master-document I couldn't master and a macro I'd never heard of.  When the Support Line assured me that mastery over master-document would be a masterful accomplishment, I felt happy/miserable, adequate/ inadequate.
            During my '82 computer-infancy to my '88 toddler stage, DOS jumped from 1.0 to 3.3;  I wasn't ready for the leap.
            I had trouble giving orders to soft diskettes and a screen that said "hello", so how would I deal with hardened hardware and a cursor devoid of courtesy?  As a writer and former college instructor of writing, I can use words perfectly but word processors reminded me of a Russian novel where I had to list the cast of characters inside the front cover to refer to as I plowed through foreign text.  
            Ah.  2017.  DOS is as foreign as horses-and-buggies.  Computers can be laptops, have touch-screens, automatic Internet plus e-mail, monitors larger than my old television sets, flash drives, and some have ‘dashboards’/ wigits/  built-in cameras so one may talk and see another person, voice-activated ability, watch television being streamed....  My husband’s wrist watch actually is a computer! I’m typing on a PS2 obsolete touch-typist keyboard, in front of a small monitor, using a WindowsVista PC with a tower on the floor, and I am constantly ridiculed for my ‘out-of-date’ equipment.  It’s comfortable, safe, does everything I currently need.  Once I was the cutting-edge; now I’m the backwards!
            Well, this newest generation of computers will probably always remind me what I did to my mother before she retired the hair brush:  in its own language, with a blank stare, it's suggesting, 'the only reason you are spanking me is because you've lost your wits and can't think of anything intelligent to say.'
 
 
 ©1992 "hysteria" magazine   published Spring 1993 issue {I own the rights} some updates re 2017 added