Computer Frustration

Some people find computers frustrating. In fact, I think anyone who both uses a computer and is sane, gets frustrated by them from time to time. As I work with friends, coworkers, and in-laws who think I am a computer guru, I sometimes have the impression that they believe my expert status puts me above computer frustration. But they have no idea!

It's true that I don't (often) get flustered by lost links, missing shortcuts, or how to get Microsoft Word to do the things I want. But as a full-time Linux user, I have graduated to a new level of computer problems; problems getting drivers to work, how to compile programs without supported libraries, how to configure shortcuts, how to get the machine to remember my settings across reboots, and how to get it to support changing my screen brightness properly (I still haven't figured that one out...). I spend time figuring out how to do things that my friends haven't ever thought needed attention (like the hours I spent last year figuring out how to get LaTeX to use Times New Roman font), as often as I spend time figuring out how to do things they didn't know were possible (how to download a few dozen web pages, strip them of code, and mass-rename them, for instance; or to sync video game profiles across four computers using Dropbox). For my case personally, as I muck through pages of documentation on the kernel settings for rebooting and I try to wrap my mind around why the system doesn't know what x-term I'm running as it wakes from sleep, I sometimes ask what any sensible person would ask: why do I do it? Why do I do things like Linux, Emacs, and LaTeX where others are totally content with Microsoft Windows and Word? In other words, don't I get tired of the time I spend trying to get things to work?

One day, as I pondered this question, I came out to see my wife. She was working on a jigsaw puzzle, a pass-time I have never really been drawn to. It seems like a frustrating way to spend your time when you could just buy the picture in the first place. A few days later I was hanging out with a young man whose favorite hobby is building model cars. I was fascinated by his fascination; building a model car, with all the minutia and frustration and glue and paint, seems like such a frustrating and unrewarding thing to me.

There is no escaping the frustrating things about computers. But different people choose to respond to them differently. Why do I experience satisfaction from the tedium of computer minutia? How can I get pleasure from a command that does something I couldn't even explain to others? Why am I thrilled when I learn a new trick in Emacs, or a new Bash command? Who knows. I guess it's a puzzle.