“Users”, that’s we they call them. We do not call them “people” or anything else remotely humane or respectful, just “users”, as if they had no purpose other than to “use”.

Within our cubicle walls we cry that name in anger or in  frustration. They only bring us work, and our work is the things they can’t figure out. Like a janitor for an exclusive prep school that only accepts bulimics in denial, I have to constantly clean up their messes instead of actually confronting the problem.  There is something fundamentally wrong with a  society that believes in the act of providing public education yet once these people are actually put in employment there is an entire division of other employees remarking constantly about how stupid they are. How they cannot actually come to terms with the tools given to them , as if all that education is seemingly worthless once placed in front of a small hundred dollar device.

 It confounds me that either the computer is the single most mentally disabling device in the world, like some kind of intricately designed Kryptonite shethed in plastic, or the user just is not superman. 

Most of those in my field , like to keep it that simple. “the user is stupid”  however, has been bandied about so often in front of me I can’t take it’s patronizing pedagogical pablum any more. No, users are not “just stupid” ,  I agree that users are not superman either, I just refuse to believe also that they are inherently any stupider than I. It is impossible that I am inherently more intellectually capable than anyone  else because I have decided to use one particular tool to my advantage. Tiger Woods may be a sports legend , Mario Andrei may drive a fast car yet no one ever believes that they are inherently more intellectually superior than us. But just because I know that the little button “shift” and the “a” button pressed one after another in quick succession selects all Items on a page , I am heralded as a “computer genius”. I am a user like all others, I just pay attention , look stuff up and refuse to be discouraged on the first or sometimes forty-fifth try.

 

Users don’t have to be so aimless, people have a purpose , each person has goals, ideas and dreams. I am sick of users, they disgust me. I don’t want to work with them anymore, I want to work with people. But that is practice, this is theory.