Saturday 15 October 2011

Today's Review: Having No Computers At Work

I think it's pretty obvious that society would crumble if all the computers stopped working. But that's shit for the future, like when we run out of electricity, or when all the machines become self aware and just don't want to live on the planet anymore. So they build a giant rocket and leave us behind. Or something like that.

But tonight I got a little taste of life without computers. At work, like most other places of work, we serve customers through a computer system. It scans the barcodes, it takes the money, and it keeps a record of everything. Except today the server went down. So who had to take the records? We did, on pieces of paper. Needless to say, the long numbers on barcodes that computers can read with a bleep take a helluva lot longer to write down painstakingly on a sheet. Everything takes about five times longer, and the kicker is that it's Saturday. While it wasn't a particularly busy Saturday, there was never really a point in the day where I was not writing down a number or working out a total, and it's completely tired me out. Maybe it's due to the lack of a gap between customers, maybe it's the large amount of manual writing I haven't done in yeats, but oh man, it's not cool.

It seems my eyes have become too accustomed to monitors and TVs too. Eight hours at work staring at a computer is fine, but a few hours of looking at a piece of paper and I felt like there was something wrong with my sight. Staring at screens may ruin your sight, but apparently only if you attempt to go back to the boring ages after.

Thankfully I have the next two days off, during which I can stare at my several functioning screens and return to a sense of normality. But a world without computers is a dark, evil place. I wish never to return.

My rating: 0/5

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