Bill Gates Ate My Weekend.

You’ve been there, and recently. So have I. Much too often. You did what the software said. You did it twice. You booted off, you booted on, you did it a third time. You meticulously followed the vastly user-unfriendly instructions of Microsoft or Symantec or any one of the dozens of software companies whose $49.95 disks have become principal threads in your life and indispensable paths to living Life As We Know It.

You did precisely what they said and the screen froze blue, or it gave you cryptic Error 8000405071b, or it turned the computer off, or it erased your data and mysteriously accused you of pilot error without the courtesy of an explanation. So you went onto Google and you entered the symptoms and you discovered thousands of other poor souls out there plaintively crying in the same wilderness because they too lost their way, hit and run victims of the same careless and dismissive software techno-barons. The blogosphere seethes with shared psychosis, the gnawing frustration of dealing with software that actually, really, probably won’t do what you assumed it would do because they promised you in the advertising.

Let’s be honest: personal computer software is the least user-friendly consumer product in our personal worlds. If a car dared to act the same way, the brakes would sometimes without warning only function if you first turned the car off and then back on and waited patiently for the right to cause the thing to cease motion. And the pedals might reboot reversed…. there would be a little text document extruding from the dashboard telling you that the work-around was to sit backwards.

My Toshiba laptop is less than two years old. Thank God I bought the extended warranty. So far the screen has failed, the DVD/CD drive has failed and finally the hard disk has failed. Of course I was backed up! But you can’t just transfer programs back over to the new hard drive. Data yes, programs mostly no. And tell me this, Bill Gates: If I’m the owner of the old hard drive, the new hard drive, the backup and the software you sold me, how come it took eight hours of support tech to get all the same stuff to work again in your Windows XP? Why are your security protections so confusing that the owner can’t get past the Administrator protections to get his own damn documents without a thousand dollars of tech help? And why did the expert at $125 an hour have to research the solutions online? Why am I paying for that and not you, huh?

The new psychotic state is profound but little studied: pathetic, despairing white hot rage descends like a veil when you realize the computer software suddenly won’t let you run your life. Like having a stroke, one indispensable lobe of your command and control goes AWOL. You use the computer to make your life easier and it often does, except for that week-long period every few months when it refuses to cooperate, rejects you and retreats into an obtuse refusal to explain what the heck is happening. A whole industry of I.T. guys lives to help you out at great expense, except if you fancy chatting with a person twelve thousand miles away with an echo who will be happy to read you scripted lines from the computer screen he’s facing in Jaipur.

The computer is the least evolved, most imperfect consumer device in history. Its user interface is so flawed that only arrogance can explain why such bright people have perpetuated its frustrations. We’ve made them very rich, but we have not made them responsive. Their focus is to make software ever more complicated, ever more evolved. They compete on bells and whistles. But years ago they left customer service, reliability, predictability and robustness far behind. And now they survive against stiff competition because all their competitors equally ignore the glazed-eyed customer who really, please I’m begging you here, would just like to get at his email.

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Peter Samuelson is a motion picture producer and philanthropist and lives in Los Angeles. petersam@who.net www.stormbreaker.com