Unhandled Exception

There, in a frame on the wall, is my diploma. Not a nasty, dirty, wet wall, but a white, clean, dry wall. It is my office wall, and that means there’s a computer nearby.

If you look carefully at my degree (thoughtfully paid for by my parents), you’ll notice a few things. My full name and the issuing school come to mind, but those are pretty common to all of the diplomas handed out on that sunny day in May of 2003. Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering. That’s what it says. It’s pretty long. So long in fact, that it barely fits on the same line. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a longer degree title issued from my school. But what do all of those words mean?

It means that not only do computers piss me off when they fail and get a “blue screen of death,” it also means that I am ultimately accountable for everything that has ever gone wrong with computers since the Greek Gods first graced humans with the abacus. Now, as any self-respecting American working in a corporate organization would do, I shift much of the blame onto my coworkers as possible to save my own ass. Joking aside (ahem), the truth is after having studied computers and software at length for the majority of my life, I have come to realize that now more than ever I wonder how the damn things work as frequently and reliably as they do.

Don’t believe me?

Count to 1 silently in your head. Did you make it? Good. How much did you get done in that one second? Consciously you only did one thing, you counted to 1. Unconsciously, you probably counted to 1 under your breath, ignoring my instructions, shoved some blood around your circulatory system, took a breath, blinked, took the image that was projected onto your retina and flipped it, divided some cells, swallowed, used countless muscles and nerves, and did a host of other bodily functions that I won’t even mention. Take a guess at how many things were going on in your body at one time in that one second that you didn’t even think about. What’s the number? Thousands? Tens-of-thousands? Millions? I don’t know, as I said I’m only a computer geek.

What I do know is that a modern desktop computer can do somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 5 BILLION instructions every second. Does it make mistakes? You betcha. All the time in fact – certainly more than you realize. There are actually all kinds of nifty methods that nerds way smarter than me have used to get that error rate down, or to recover so quickly from an exception that you don’t even notice it. In fact, computer scientists specifically design software to try to handle anything that an unpredictable human can come up with. That doesn’t stop most people from shouting obscenities at machines when something unexpected arises. Keep in mind, these are machines that are only doing what some imperfect human has told them to do. (Actually, now that I think about it, some of my best insults and profane phrases are directly related to Microsoft’s mother.) In any case, if the rare exception does occur, just dial the help desk and they’ll solve the problem, or in more dire consequences, give you a new computer that is far 'superior' to your old. At the very least you can bitch at them and feel better about your current predicament.

Therein lies the irony. Think back to all of the stuff you were doing when you were counting to 1. Did you ever stop to think about how often that perfect computer in your head makes mistakes? Ever open a web browser window to a search engine and forget why? How about pick up the phone and forget whom you were about to call? When’s the last time you made a grocery list and left it sitting on the table? Every time you set the alarm to PM instead of AM, have something on the ‘tip of your tongue,’ use the phrase ‘Now why didn’t I think of that?”, put your shoe on the wrong foot, lose your car keys, or have something ‘go down the wrong pipe' you’ve had an unhandled exception…in your brain. I make mistakes like this on an hourly basis. Probably more frequently.

Who do you call when that happens? There’s no brain-fart hotline in India to answer questions or to listen to you bitch about your own absentmindedness or stupidity (Note to self: possible lucrative business opportunity in opening a brain-fart helpdesk).

Here’s an interesting thought. For every 10 minutes of an hour that your computer did something wrong, it did 3 trillion seemingly correct tasks in the other 50 minutes. When was the last time you gave the impression that you did something right 3 trillion times in a row?

I've Got Leghairs in My Eyebrows

I wish I could take credit for being the first person to have put these words together in this particular order. Never before have six words created such a clear mental image in my mind. I wish I could draw for you what I see when I read that sentence aloud. You are probably fortunate that I am quite inept at art, because frankly, it’s pretty clear the type of image it creates, and it’s even more evident that it’s gross.

Grooming in general is such a tremendous pain in the ass. I’ll never understand how the makeup companies have convinced people of the need to rip out eyebrows and then draw them back on with a pencil. One of my personal beefs is shaving, largely because it just plain sucks. It’s no wonder really. Think about it at the most basic level. You are putting a sharp blade…on your skin. What group of Darwinist fools conjured up this scenario? If you screw up, your body has no problem telling you how much of a dumbass you are by rushing pints of blood to a cut smaller than a Tic-Tac. There’s a reason one of the weapons in Clue is a knife.

For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that having hair is part of being a mammal. Let’s also ignore the fact that humans are the only creatures vain enough to find it necessary to chop off stuff that purportedly exists keeps us warm. (When was the last time you saw a chimp, or whale for that matter, get a bikini wax?) We’ve got space heaters, blankets, and IcyHot to take care of that.

Let’s instead create another mental image – what if the Earth had to shave? Picture a gigantic forest. Not a scary Blair Witch style forest that can lower the IQ of attractive teenagers to a point where they end up dead at the hands of a barely adept serial killer. No, we’re going for a Bambiequse (pre-fire) style forest here. A place where skunks and rabbits are friends and butterflies can make a fawn stumble and fall simply by landing on its nose. Green, lush, tranquil. Picture that setting as the US’s beard. (Or leg/arm hair if you prefer. It doesn’t matter.)

Now, let’s take what we do to our legs or face every day, and explode it to the macro level. Try to imagine a measurement scale where one tree = one hair. When you get to that scale, think of how big of a razor you’d have to have to chop down Bambi’s home as quickly as we slice up our own tiny trees every day.

Without doing any kind of actual mathematics (I only hold a minor, so I don’t need to do real research), I would estimate that one blade of the razor would be 160 miles long and 10 miles wide. In today’s high tech society, you get mocked and judged if you use any less than three blades to ritualistically mutilate yourself after bathing, which means our forest felling Gillette is at least 4800 square miles. That’s about the size of Connecticut, for those who are keeping score.

So now, if we take the beard scenario, we are dragging a Constitution State sized blade across the country and along both coastlines from San Francisco, down around the goatee of Texas, to Washington D.C. skipping only Oklahoma and part of Arkansas (our imaginary US mouth would fall in this area). Every day. Can you imagine the havoc this would cause in our day-to-day lives? The collateral damage on the US highway system alone would be devastating, particularly since roads are already in a seemingly perpetual state of construction.

While a scenario like this might benefit evil corporations like Grandma’s Friendly Concrete, Paint Supplies, and Baked Goods, I really think that the global economy would be more than a little impacted by the constant rebuilding and subsequent destruction of the cities and roads across the United States. It seems naturally logical that we don’t destroy our country every day. Some might say it would spare us catcalls about affectations from France and New Zealand, but who cares about them anyway?

Let’s shrink back down a few levels again. Did you ever stop to think about the collateral damage you are doing to your skin every time you put your own little Constitution state against it? Neither had I, until today. I wonder how many microscopic empires I’ve crushed and tollbooths I’ve knocked over without a second thought.