Computers in the office: They're taking control

More people are becoming dependent on computers.
By BEN GRABOW
SCRIPPS HOWARD
The setting: any given cube in any given office. The cast: two hapless office drones.
"This article I'm reading online is great, except for these weird little symbols where the apostrophes should be. They're really distracting."
"Well, why don't you try copying the entire document into Word, then doing a Ctrl F find-and-replace to change all those symbols to apostrophes?"
"Wow. That's really ... efficient."
"I know. I'm as frightened as you are."
Those of us who spend our days in an office habitat live a separate life. This life is not subject to the rules of the outside world. And when we're not careful, the borders begin to blur.
In the office, our computer programs dictate the law. We do as these programs say, and more often than not, we wait when they tell us to wait. Every now and then we get an admonition from the heavens in the form of an error warning we don't understand.
From the book of Run-Time Error, version 3.0: Lo, and a blue screen did appear, and the people shook in horror. A sacrifice was made to appease the screen, and a 16-page report was reduced to naught. So it is written and so it shall be.
After day in and day out in this computer world, it can be difficult to tell the difference between office-land and real life.
'Immersion'
In video-game parlance, this is known as "immersion." It's similar to playing the same video game for hours upon hours, and then looking for good hiding places and climbable overhangs at the grocery store. As though you may need to carefully avoid a patrolling grocery cart, or stealthily request a half-pound of Colby cheese.
"Yes, yes that's thick enough. Quick, the cart is coming back! Don't you hear the squeaking?!"
After a week of no-lunch break, word-processing slavery, it is easy to become immersed in the world of Word. You begin to assume powers that you do not regularly possess. You stand in the kitchen, flipping pancakes on Sunday morning, when you miss the pan and send a flapjack sailing to the unwashed linoleum beneath you. And instinctively, you think:
"Ooh! Ctrl Z! Undo!"
But with the warm oozing of pancake batter between your toes comes the realization that, yes, your word processor owns you.
Computer-savvy
For many of us, to be young and gainfully employed is to spend more than eight hours a day in front of a monitor. We grew up with these computers, learned to run programs in elementary school, and some of us bear the honorable distinction of having captured Carmen Sandiego. (She was in the library in Munich all along).
While our parents were just learning to check "e-mail" in their offices, we'd been using our computers for years.
Now, though we may be at the bottom of our respective corporate ladders, we're still showing our managers how to open a file, and laughing quietly in our cubes when they e-mail the entire office by mistake. But there's a price to be paid for our smugness: total dependence on the cyclopean glow of our 10x12 screens.
What would we do without undo? How would we reason without Google?
But don't despair, fellow office drones. For though your computer owns your life now, help is on the way. A wave of people are waiting to liberate you from your computer-owned lives, freeing you to bag groceries and serve lattes.
Somewhere, right now, far across the ocean, a young man is dropping hot baba ganoush on his foot and thinking (in a heavy accent): "Dah! Ctrl Z! Undo!"