I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Travel
ISBN: 9780767903820
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2000-06-06T04:56:37+00:00

When we moved to America, the change in electrical systems meant I needed all new stuff for my office—computer, fax machine, answering machine, and so on. I am not good at shopping or parting with large sums of money at the best of times, and the prospect of trailing around a succession of shops listening to sales assistants touting the wonders of various office products filled me with foreboding.

So imagine my delight when in the first computer store I went to I found a machine that had everything built into it— fax, answering machine, electronic address book, Internet capability, you name it. Advertised as “The Complete Home Office Solution,” this computer promised to do everything but make the coffee.

So I took it home and set it up, flexed my fingers, and wrote a perky fax to a friend in London. I typed his fax number in the appropriate box as directed and pushed “Send.” Almost at once, noises of international dialing came out of the computer’s built-in speakers. Then there was a ringing tone, and finally an unfamiliar voice that said: “Allo? Allo?”

“Hello?” I said in return, and realized that there was no way I could talk to this person, whoever he was.

My computer began to make shrill fax noises. “Allo? Allo?” the voice said again, with a touch of puzzlement and alarm. After a moment, he hung up. Instantly, my computer redialed his number.

And so it went for much of the morning, with my computer repeatedly pestering some unknown person in an unknown place while I searched frantically through the manual for a way to abort the operation. Eventually, in desperation, I unplugged the computer, which shut down with a series of “Big Mistake!” and “Crisis in the Hard Drive!” noises.

Three weeks later—this is true—we received a phone bill with $68 in charges for calls to Algiers. Subsequent inquiries revealed that the people who had written the software for the fax program had not considered the possibility of overseas transmissions. The program was designed to read seven-digit phone numbers with three-digit area codes. Confronted with any other combination of numbers, it went into a sort of dial-abedouin default mode.

I also discovered that the electronic address book had a similar aversion to addresses without standard U.S. zip codes, rendering it all but useless for my purposes, and that the answering machine function had a habit of coming on in the middle of conversations.

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a dangerously perfect match.

You will have read about the millennium bug. You know then that at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, all the computers in the world will for some reason go through a thought process something like this: “Well, here we are in a new year that ends in ’00.

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