Bill Bryson I'm a Stranger Here Myself

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three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in
a chair with cushions. However, Fillmore has become so celebrated for his obscurity that he is no
longer actually obscure, which rather disqualifies him from serious consideration.
Far more noteworthy to my mind is the great Chester A. Arthur, who was sworn in as president in
1881, posed for an official photograph, and then, as far as I can make out, was never heard from
again. If Arthur's goal in life was to grow rather splendid facial hair and leave plenty of room in the
history books for the achievements of other men, then his presidency can be ranked a sterling
success.
Also admirable in their way were Rutherford B. Hayes, who was president from 1877 to 1881 and
whose principal devotions were the advocacy of "hard money" and the repeal of the Bland-Allison
Act, preoccupations so pointless and abstruse that no one can remember now what they were, and
Franklin Pierce, whose term of office from 1853 to 1857 was an interlude of indistinction between
two longer periods of anonymity. He spent virtually the whole of his incumbency hopelessly
intoxicated, prompting the affectionate slogan "Franklin Pierce, the Hero of Many a Well-Fought
Bottle."
My favorites, however, are the two presidents Harrison. The first was William Henry Harrison,
who heroically refused to don an overcoat for his inaugural ceremony in 1841, consequently caught
pneumonia, and with engaging swiftness expired. He was president for just thirty days, nearly all of
it spent unconscious. Forty years later his grandson, Benjamin Harrison, was elected president and
succeeded in the challenging ambition of achieving as little in four years as his grandfather had in a
month.
As far as I am concerned, all these men deserve public holidays of their own. So you may conceive
my dismay at news that moves are afoot in Congress to abolish Presidents Day and return to
observing
Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays separately, on the grounds that Lincoln and Washington were
truly great men and, moreover, didn't pee out the window. Can you believe that? Some people have
no sense of history.
LOST IN CYBERLAND
When we moved to America, the change in electrical systems meant I needed all new stuff for my
office-computer, fax machine, answering machine, and so on. I am not good at shopping or parting
with large sums of money at the best of times, and the prospect of trailing around a succession of
shops listening to sales assistants touting the wonders of various office products filled me with
foreboding.
So imagine my delight when in the first computer store I went to I found a machine that had
everything built into it-fax, answering machine, electronic address book, Internet capability, you
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name it. Advertised as "The Complete Home Office Solution," this computer promised to do
everything but make the coffee.
So I took it home and set it up, flexed my fingers, and wrote a perky fax to a friend in London. I
typed his fax number in the appropriate box as directed and pushed "Send." Almost at once, noises
of international dialing came out of the computer's built-in speakers. Then there was a ringing tone,
and finally an unfamiliar voice that said: "Allo? Allo?"
"Hello?" I said in return, and realized that there was no way I could talk to this person, whoever he
was.
My computer began to make shrill fax noises. "Allo? Allo?" the voice said again, with a touch of
puzzlement and alarm. After a moment, he hung up. Instantly, my computer redialed his number.
67
And so it went for much of the morning, with my computer repeatedly pestering some unknown
person in an unknown place while I searched frantically through the manual for a way to abort the
operation.
Eventually, in desperation, I unplugged the computer, which shut down with a series of "Big
Mistake!" and "Crisis in the Hard Drive!" noises.
Three weeks later-this is true-we received a phone bill with $68 in charges for calls to Algiers.
Subsequent inquiries revealed that the people who had written the software for the fax program had
not considered the possibility of overseas transmissions. The program was designed to read
seven-digit phone numbers with three-digit area codes. Confronted with any other combination of
numbers, it went into a sort of dial-a-bedouin default mode.
I also discovered that the electronic address book had a similar aversion to addresses without
standard U. S. zip codes, rendering it all but useless for my purposes, and that the answering
machine function had a habit of coming on in the middle of conversations.
For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so le ading edge, could be so useless,
and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart
things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.
They are, in short, a dangerously perfect match.
You will have read about the millennium bug. You know then that at the stroke of midnight on
January 1, 2000, all the computers in the world will for some reason go through a thought process
something like this:
"Well, here we are in a new year that ends in '00. I expect it's 1900. But wait-if it's 1900, computers
haven't been invented yet. Therefore I don't exist. Guess I had better shut myself down and wipe my
memory clean." The estimated cost to put this right is $200 trillion gazillion or some such
preposterous sum. A computer, you see, can calculate pi to twenty thousand places but can't work
out that time always moves forward. Programmers, meanwhile, can write eighty thousand lines of
complex code but fail to note that every hundred years you get a new century. It's a disastrous
combination.
When I first read that the computer industry had created a problem for itself so basic, so immense,
and so foolish, I suddenly understood why my fax facility and other digital toys are worthless. But
this still doesn't adequately explain the wondrous-the towering-uselessness of my computer's spell
checker.
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Like nearly everything else to do with computers, a spell checker is marvelous in principle. When [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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