Full System Integration

March 11, 2001 - Spokesman Review Street Level column:

My Life, Computers -- Full System Integration

I spent much of this morning staring at the Blue Screen of Death. Microsoft Windows users know what I'm talking about. This is the jarring, bright blue "fatal exception" screen that appears when Windows turns up its toes and dies.

You can either press a key and go back to the feeble remnants of your system or press the Ctrl, Alt and Del keys to tell your computer to restart and attempt to resurrect itself.

So this morning, I'm annoyed. I do know what the problem is, anyway. I spent hours last weekend downloading and installing a new driver for my removable Zip drive. Unfortunately, installing the new software was a bad idea, hence all the quality time I've been spending with the Blue Screen of Death.

I removed the offending software "upgrade" but the very existence of the Zip drive continued to crash the computer with a resounding thud. So I yanked the Zip drive and its cable off the back and kissed it goodbye for now.

If you've spent any time with a computer, my morning may sound familiar. In fact, there's a special kind of stress experienced by computer users called "technostress." The term was defined in 1984 by Craig Brod in his book, "Technostress: the Human Cost of the Computer Revolution."

Brod said technostress is "a modern disease of adaptation caused by an inability to cope with the new computer technologies in a healthy manner. It manifests itself in two distinct and related ways: in the struggle to accept computer technology and in the more specialized form of overidentification with computer technology."

During breakfast, I started thinking about what my life would be like if I'd never used a computer. Would my stress level be lower without technostress thrown into the mix? Maybe. Would I be living in a log house in the Idaho Panhandle surrounded by forest and a lot of dogs and cats? Probably not.

As I turned on the way-back machine in my brain, I had to go to 1983 to find a time before I'd ever touched a computer.

Because I publish a computer magazine, a lot of people have asked me how I got "into" computers. I'd love to say it was a major turning point in my life, but the boring truth is that like most important events in life, my introduction to computers was an accident. My college roommate broke my typewriter.

When I graduated from high school, my parents gave me the traditional gift: a typewriter. It was a sleek, black Olivetti electric whose major claim to fame was that it could erase.

By second semester, the typewriter and I had shared a few tense moments cranking out English papers at the crack of dawn. I didn't think much of it when my roommate asked to borrow it. Later, my roommate moved out and "couldn't remember" where my typewriter was (uh oh).

The situation was getting dire as deadlines for final papers began to loom. Finally, my typewriter mysteriously reappeared but it didn't work anymore. During the deadline crises, no one was willing to loan out typewriters. So I steeled myself and went down to the dark depths of the library basement where, someone had told me, three computers lurked.

Not many people remember a word processing program called Xywrite and there's a good reason for that. But I persevered because there weren't a whole lot of typewriter repair shops around and the library computers were free, after all.

My junior year was marked by the discovery of the Macintosh. The guy in the next room had a brand new 128K Macintosh and instead of arcane function keys, the Mac had a little smiley icon, games and even a program that let you spray paint things. (Look, a happy computer that can create graffiti!)

After I graduated from college, I got a job at a print shop because I was the only applicant who had ever touched a Macintosh. I learned PageMaker version 1.

When I moved to California, I got a job doing desktop publishing because I was the only applicant who had used PageMaker and thus knew what desktop publishing was. But they used PCs, so I learned all about DOS, and later, Windows.

In California, I lived with a number of roommates, including two programmers. So I learned about computers at work and at home.

Later, I married one of those programmers and the Internet started to appear on the scene. We started our own business when we realized that armed with a computer and modem we could do our jobs from anywhere. In time, we moved ourselves and the business to a log house in Idaho.

So, yes, technostress may be a part of my life now. But in the end I can't imagine my life without computers. As it turns out, it's really not a stretch to say that without computers I wouldn't have my current husband, home or career.

Susan Daffron, Sandpoint, is the editor of Computor Companion magazine and a member of The Spokesman-Review's Board of Contributors.