William Trost Richards: Tree Roots (19th-20th century)

"May the Grace of perseverance preserve my sanity in the face of this unending inanity."

I recently complained here about the new and improved Google Apps, for they seemed to have been specially designed to be unusable. Further use has led me to a deeper understanding that they were not new or improved but rely upon a now ancient design, one I had until recently managed to avoid learning. They employ the same form as MS-DOS' old hierarchical directory design, one so counter-intuitive as to seem unusable to anyone not entrained to comprehend it. I do not know how one comes to learn how to use RootDirectories and such. I know they offer few clues about navigating within and around them. I'm suddenly back to the primitive hunt-and-peck stage, often bewildered and frozen without a clue what to do next. If The Muse isn't around to advise, I stay frozen until after she returns.

The Muse is barely civil when I ask her one of my questions, for she learned about RootDirectories ages ago. She has to think a moment or two, often more, to find words to describe activities she hasn't thought about in decades. I've been complaining about my inability to find a file I was just working on. The system reliably hides them somewhere utterly inaccessible. Further, a straightforward copy-and-paste operation becomes a Federal Case when attempted within GoogleDocs. Formatting seems a straightforward matter of severely limited choices, for the BOLD command is hidden beneath an utterly meaningless icon where nobody's intuition could ever imagine finding it. The whole system has been designed precisely like this.

I understand programmers and coders prefer to work within this structure. The hard drive on my MacBook Air features fewer than a dozen highest-level folders. I rarely use more than a couple of them. Most of my documents end up in one of two places, and the rest of my voluminous hard drive contains archival storage organized in no particular fashion. If I really need to find something, it's likely to have been stored in some no longer readable language. Search rarely finds anything, regardless of how I might fashion the inquiry. In short, my computing life has, gratefully, been conducted on an intuitive plane. It's unique to me and eminently understandable to nobody else. Why do I have five separate folders titled Keeper Poems? Heck, if I know. I suppose a few folders were temporarily inaccessible in the past, so I needed to create new ones, and then the older ones returned. That often happens.

The RootDirectory world, though, was fashioned rather than evolved. It must be learned because it was expressly designed to be counter-intuitive. Old dogs like me, who never knew that operating strategy in youth, seem unlikely ever to catch up. I cannot imagine myself confidently remembering how to navigate that so-called workspace. If the purpose of life lies in becoming irrelevant, the RootDirectory route seems promising. It appalls me to think that so many were trained to work within those constraints and never experienced the magic of genuinely intuitive computing. I understand that collaborative creation probably calls for a baseline of homogenization. Still, it seems sad that so few experience the true mystery at the heart of effective computing. If most of the questions have definite answers, if the structure of a universe can be finely enforced, creativity seems sure to take it in the shorts.

It's an open question whether this old dog can survive trying to employ this sort of computing. I'm a writer, not a coder. I found Word unusable thirty years ago. I usually write in an application not designed for writing because it enforces few conventions on me. It doesn't know how to improve my grammar. It doesn't care whether I misspell. Later, after I've written, I can employ the tools to shine up the result, but the constant monitoring of work in progress could only encumber progress. Likewise, I cannot access the states necessary to create when I must remain conscious of my location within the hierarchical structure. It just cannot be done. I cannot seem to transcend what I cannot comprehend. Instead, I stall and go searching for The Muse, who will exhale annoyedly, close her eyes as if encountering absolute idiocy, and struggle to answer my sincere question. How do I get to that RootDirectory again? It was there but then it just disappeared. May the Grace of perseverance preserve my sanity in the face of this unending inanity.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz