Can you imagine having to restart your car engine several times a trip?

What about a temperamental freezer that lets your meat rack defrost for no apparent reason?

Well, I guess we wouldn’t accept that…

So why are we so tolerant of our PCs?

With one billion estimated PCs across the globe, you would expect the PC experience to be top notch or at least as reliable as the other equipment a modern person depends upon.

Despite the 21^st century shiny exterior packaging with 3D in-store display units, colorful animated boxes and every metallic shade of aluminum you can imagine, unfortunately in some ways the PCs’ interior performance is somewhere back in the past, struggling to keep up with the modern mass-market exterior. The average PC still causes endless frustration for its users. Yet, somehow, most of us are just taking it.

The truth is, a simple comparison to the other parts of our daily lives reveals a sharp discrepancy when it comes to our tolerance levels. What people tolerate from their PCs would never fly with their home entertainment system, or even their $9.99 no-name kettle.

So why do we accept such low standards for our PCs, and tolerate these constant work disruptions?

You may simply answer “Get a Mac!” Well, although Macs are generally perceived as being more reliable than PCs, they are not free from problems (some Mac users are in denial on this point)… But in any case, this whole Mac vs. PC debate is an interesting subject on its own, so let’s leave it for a separate blog post…

Right now we’re exploring why the masses are so tolerant of their PCs. Here are some possible explanations:

The PC love-hate relationship

One possible explanation is that it’s the only friend we know. Our PCs help us do a whole lot more than we can with our human limitations – brains, fingers and even pocket calculators. So while PCs aren’t perfect, we’re willing to accept quite a whole lot of slack for lack of a better alternative. A kind of love-hate relationship. But then again, even though I really appreciate the keys on this keyboard and can’t really type without them… I wouldn’t put up with the Ddddddd just repeating itself over and over again for no apparent reason – so I guess that theory is limited.

It’s us, not them

Another explanation is presuming it’s us, not them. PCs were historically intended for tech- guys who, we all presume, can fix every problem their PCs present. The rest of us professionals and regular people may presume that it’s our computer literacy limitations causing these problems, and the systems admin guy, if there is one, will eventually sort it out.

But then again, most people don’t have the first clue how their fax machine actually sends images to a piece of paper on the other side of the world, yet they still expect it to arrive…  And even with very tech-smart people at our disposal, we all know they don’t always succeed in relieving an aching user from his PC pains as heralded by the dreaded ‘sorry, not much more we can do here – we’re gonna have to format the PC’. So that theory is also kinda holey.

We’ve all been trained well

A third possibility could be that we’ve simply been trained to have low expectations from our PCs and the software they run. From the first Microsoft Windows operating system, we were trained to accept certain fundamental principles; one being that your PC will always have bugs, delays, and crashes. Even though some aspects of the problem have been improved over the past few years, we still see frustration bundled with the experience of using a PC, and that’s just the way we’ve always known it to be… sad, but apparently true.

These are some of our theories trying to answer the absurd phenomenon whereby most of us are way more tolerant of our PCs than we would be of any other more complex or more simple devices we rely upon. We are still intrigued by this and as you can see don’t have a clear answer (nor do we know if there is one).

So why do you think we’re all so tolerant of our PCs?

Roee

2 Responses to “Why are we so PC tolerant?”