The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why Beelzebub hasn’t made the switch to bitumen is, quite frankly, anybody’s guess. I’ve no idea what kind road surface you get from ‘good intentions’; whether they play merry havoc with the suspension system or offer a superior driving experience, I simply couldn’t say. Then there is the also matter of the road less travelled. Sometimes such a road is less travelled for good reason, such as a lack of quality paving (there are, after all, only so many ‘good intentions’ to go around) or a faulty GPS. But I can’t blame either of these. For me, the road less travelled is precisely that because of brutal combination of being risk averse and laziness.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why Beelzebub hasn’t made the switch to bitumen is, quite frankly, anybody’s guess. I’ve no idea what kind road surface you get from ‘good intentions’; whether they play merry havoc with the suspension system or offer a superior driving experience, I simply couldn’t say. Then there is the also matter of the road less travelled. Sometimes such a road is less travelled for good reason, such as a lack of quality paving (there are, after all, only so many ‘good intentions’ to go around) or a faulty GPS. But I can’t blame either of these. For me, the road less travelled is precisely that because of brutal combination of being risk averse and laziness.
Indeed, when it comes to the road less travelled, no one is less travelled than I. Rather than finding myself buoyed by the notion of adventure or the thrill of the unknown, I prefer to carve a path and stick to it with a steely determination that defies not only common sense, but gravity itself. What it lacks in surprise it more than makes up for with certainty. Some roads should not be traversed, some questions are best left unasked and there are invitations that should never be accepted.
There is no better example of this than my response to computer error messages. From time to time, I am confronted with a screen that slips from glacially slow to a state of suspended animation. After several hours, I will abandon waiting and seek to hurry things along thereby prompting a message from the computer. This message invariably tells me that the program is ‘not responding’. Although my grasp of matters technological can fairly be described as ‘limited’, this much I will have already figured out for myself. It’s either a statement of the crushingly obvious pitched directly at those who, at time of issue, are half way through plunging a screwdriver into the keyboard hoping to pry the machine open and fix the problem with string or, alternatively, it is simply rubbing your nose in it.
The message then offers you the option of sending an ‘error report’ to a major computer firm. As a matter of reflex, I have consistently declined this invitation. There are a variety of reasons for such reluctance. In the early days, I harboured a lingering doubt as to the origins of the software I was using. I didn’t want to send an error report only for the door to be kicked down within minutes and to watch the IT System Administrator being led away in handcuffs, no doubt to be dragged off to an interrogation by a bunch of nerds before being carted to an information technology gulag where your hard-drive is forever crashing. But even once I was confident that my software was legitimate, my reluctance to complain continued.
As much as anything, I didn’t want to be a bother. I would hate to dispatch an ‘error message’ without a second thought, never realizing that I have just reduced a team of software engineers to tears. I imagine that they sit together in a large room in front of a gigantic monitor – a monument built in the shadow of the Y2K crisis that never was – fingers crossed that computers all across the world will manage to operate without collapsing into a steaming, chaotic heap. I imagine that it looks like the kind of venue NASA uses to track shuttle launches. Upon a careless push of a button, the giant screen will turn red and a siren will sound. Hands will leap to heads as dozens of people begin to scurry in panic at the news that my computer is crashing…
Perhaps I’m kidding myself. Chances are, my error message will sit along with millions of others on a computer somewhere, waiting for future generations to discover it and ask why, why indeed, did my computer see fit to fall flat on its face one Monday morning as I tried to check the weather. It’s a question that will remain unanswered. But roads only remain untraveled until the day you decide to take a detour. And when it comes to detours, it’s rarely too late. Only yesterday, I was sitting at my computer when it froze. Having first tried to restore things myself by way of verbal encouragement that soon descended into a series of threats, I decided to send an error report. As I clicked the mouse, the computer instantly stopped shaking and all went quiet. That, so I thought, was that.
The first thing I heard was the sound of the helicopter. The sun was blacked out and the building began to shake. Through my window, I watched as the first of the elite IT consultants slid down an abseiling rope. Heavily armed (they were a shade overweight), they demanded that I step slowly away from the keyboard. A spotlight shone down upon my laptop as one of them – with magnifying glass spectacles and a gold-edged pen protector – stepped forward. He was, I suspect, their leader. The room fell into a hush and the man leaned forward. Had anyone been so careless as to drop a pin, we would surely have heard it. ‘Yep,’ said the IT Consultant. ‘It’s definitely not responding.’ Sometimes the road less travelled leads to some glorious destination, with untold riches and reward. But, more often, it is just another dead end. From now on, I’ll be sticking to my routine.