Automatic Glory

I was looking into a new computer yesterday.  The one I like has a terabyte of something on it.  It sounds prehistorically glorious.  Maybe it grows legs and screams and runs around the room with large menacing claws. Not likely, but with terminology invented by teenaged boys, capabilities are more likely to trend in that direction than toward cute hairdos and bling.  

Computers are everywhere now.  TVs are computers, DVD players with recording devices are computers, and cars have computers in them.  They start the car, assess the engine, check the brakes and dim the lights.  They tell us how to get to the nearest pizza joint and when to turn and proceed straight ahead while driving in unfamiliar towns.

Nothing is done unless a computer gets its motherboard into the mix somehow.  People go to YouTube to get instructions on how to knit, when in the past they just sat with their grandmothers and learned how.  Now grandmothers are somewhere else getting their hair color balanced (analyzed by computers) and nails polished (colors designed on a computer) or vacationing on cruise ships run by computers.

Airport trams are managed by computer systems.  At Denver International way out on the plains near Kansas, you fly in on a computer-piloted jet (the pilot keeps the seat warm in the cockpit), the bags are loaded onto a computerized baggage system and you find your way to the claim area to pick them up from a computerized baggage merry-go-round after being whisked to the area on a driver-less train.  People step on en masse, grip handrails after being commanded to do so by a computer voice, and the doors swoosh closed.  Then you rumble at a speed determined by a computer through an underground route to your destination, announced by the computer voice.  The doors fly open and everyone is commanded to exit to the platform or risk getting crushed in the computer-controlled door.  Everyone obeys.

The computer-driven world has no patience for laggards.  If you cannot figure out what you are to do next, you are hung up on, left behind, silenced or deleted.  That's it, you're done slow poke.

So, this new computer with terabytes of something is arrayed with features I am to adore and use to bring ease and comfort to my life, freeing up gigabytes of time with which I may whisk through my days effortlessly.  I dunno.  I was kind of hoping instead I'd find a good fireplace and a few good friends to sit around with and shoot the breeze, but they're all busy fixing their computers.