Yesterday afternoon, I was on a conference call with a group of clients. One of the women was attempting to do the call through her mobile phone, which was also receiving e-mail (it didn’t work, of course). Before I realized what was happening we were not talking about story ideas but the operating system. And once it came up, it was the focus of the meeting for more than half an hour. Two other people on the call had upgraded around the same time that I did, and – are you ready for this? – we’re all having the same problems. So they shared their troubles with me, and I shared mine with them, and at one point I was able to walk one of the women through the steps required to disable a certain feature within the operating system that generates blank e-mail messages in its attempt to reconcile various parts of the inbox. In what I suppose is the technology age’s version of bartering, one of the people on the call then walked me through the steps required to direct meeting requests to certain calendars within the inbox (I have five calendars at the moment, because the company that created the operating system apparently believes that I need them).
At any rate, my point is not to talk about the operating system. My point is, when did it become just sort of business as usual for things to not work they way they’re supposed to? I think the appropriate way to deal with a product that doesn’t work correctly is to take it back. But yesterday, without even thinking about it, we all put our work on hold and focused instead on the nuances of the operating system. Which made me wonder, in the early days of things like television and radio, did people get together to discuss the finer points of tuning in to specific channels and stations? Maybe they did: I wasn’t there at the time, so I cannot say for sure. But I cannot imagine my grandparents tolerating that sort of crappy craftsmanship. And besides, according to the marketing department, when it comes to operating systems, we’re hardly in the early days.
