Secrets of Heliopoli, No. 8

The chief archivist remains stupendously and utterly convinced that computers do not save us time, only shift it.

(And perhaps his next computer won’t be one that requires a three-hour-long update download, the installation of which comes with confusing instructions, and there’s more updates to come. Perhaps when the antivirus software alerts him that a particular file is trying to access the Internet, it could tell him from which program it comes, so he could determine friend or foe and not freak. Perhaps when a program is installing and asks him if he wants A or B, there could be one — just one — little explanation of the consequences of choosing A or B, since neither A nor B is defined in any clear way. Perhaps he could learn whether the instruction “Close all open programs” means his Internet connection as well, which he figures it does, since it’s, um, an open program, though when he does this the other programs don’t seem to like it much. Perhaps someone somewhere could write clear step-by-step instructions for … anything. And all of this after the above sentence was written and prepared as a blog post. Sheesh.)