| 0 Almost everyone says that computers are wonderful and that they are
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| 00 changing our own lives for the better by making everything faster and
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| 1 more reliable, but I’m not so much sure that this is the case.
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| 2 The other day I was standing in a large department store until
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| 3 waiting to pay for a couple of films for my camera when the assistant
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| 4 announced that the computer which controlled the till it had stopped
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| 5 working. I didn’t think this was a big problem and I set myself off to
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| 6 find another counter, but of course, all the machines are one part of
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| 7 the same system. So there we were: a shop full of customers, money
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| 8 at the ready, waiting to make our purchases, but it was quite clear that
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| 9 none out of the assistants knew what to do. They weren’t allowed to
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| 10 take our money and give to customers a written receipt, because the
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| 11 sales wouldn’t then have been recorded on the computer system.
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| 12 In the end, like with many other people, I left my shopping on the
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| 13 counter and walked out. Don’t you think so that’s ridiculous? It would
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| 14 never have happened before computers, and that, for me, is all the
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| 15 problem: we are beginning to depend on these machines for so
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| 16 completely that we simply can’t manage without them any more.
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