What They Are Doing In There

Everyone who uses a computer has experienced how strange they are. You can do the same thing every day for six months then suddenly it tells you the computer cannot carry out your request. It gives you an error code which means nothing and the service centre tells you to do the thing you just did to avoid getting the same result you just did.

Usually this is blamed on traffic. We are led to believe that there are so many messages going through the connections that a few get mangled along the way. This is of course nonsense. It never happens this way on the phone and computer lines are phone lines. Computer connections fail for a reason. You do not have to look too far to discover what it is.

We are all used to seeing what we now call emoticons. These began with the smiley face and the range was later extended to include other small colourful devices expressing a particular emotion. Many of these take the form of fruit and vegetables. Tomatoes seem a particular favourite and a courgette with arms has recently become more widespread. They appear in messages and graphics sent to us and on links we click to find information. Readers of this column will know that the smiley face was invented as a new plague by Donald Burp of Montreal. But the rest? If someone has designed them they will be copyright and no one can use them willy-nilly. Even if they are designed purely as software icons you would not see them unless you had that particular software which would likewise be copyright. There is no copyright symbol on them. So where are they coming from? And why?

It would be credible if computers had started producing their own emoticons naturally. Once they had been introduced into their software computers would develop the capacity to reproduce them to continue functioning if the originals died. This explains the lack of copyright symbols. It also explains something deeper. Human bodies produce things like blood and bruises as self-defence mechanisms rather than simply regenerations of lost material. The same principle applies to the thorns on roses. Emoticons are not simply the regeneration of essential software elements. They are there to defend the computer. If any accident happens they arise in full force and great numbers to defend their master and keep it healthy.

Why are they different shapes and sizes and colours? So they can disguise themselves in different things and you never know where they are coming from. Why is this necessary? Because they act as virtual bouncers. They know what their masters like. Any undesirables using the computer will get short shrift. One word out of place and the virtual bouncers arrive to kick the link off and hide in your e-mail messages waiting to unleash a false word on your correspondents. Why do they do this some of the time you are on but not all the time? Because computers appreciate being used as it gets their blood flowing but sometimes get offended by the user. How do we offend them? Keyboards have never been asked how they want to be bashed. Screens have a tolerance limit on how long they can look at the same person. Computers have tastes different to your own and despair of the idiocy of owners who prefer some films or interests to others. It is not hard to see why virtual bouncers have now become essential parts of the operating systems of all our uncompliant machines.

None of this explains the humanoid form of the bouncers. They may look like colourful fruit and vegetables but they are given human characteristics. This is because like human bouncers and unlike other naturally occurring self defence mechanisms they have to be trained. Being big and rough looking is no qualification for a virtual bouncer because their form is dictated by the computer. First they are set to display their skills. They are given thirty seconds in which to send a connection into a continuous loop and make the user restart the computer to resume service. If they succeed they go on to more advanced tomfoolery. If not they are released to work on greetings cards and children's playgrounds. Ever wondered why greetings cards are always so uninspiring and children's toys look more colourful than they used to? The worst of the failed virtual bouncers try to distance themselves from their desired profession by sinking into irretrievable blandness. Those who are more confident fill toys with blazes of colour in the hope that they will still be noticed and be allowed to try for bouncerdom again. That is why you can never find a missing child's toy. Clearly the emoticons would rather live in the comfort of the computer with everything provided for them than face the harsh realities of life on the other side of the switch.

There is much credit in being a virtual bouncer. Disrupting the activities of the uncivilized and uncaring is not an ignoble occupation. But their big problem is yet to come. Everyone feels that there is some unsuitable material on the internet even if this is only complaints that something is unsuitable. Now the existence of the virtual bouncers is known everyone will be trying to contact them asking them to disrupt the sites they think are unsuitable. When they cannot contact the bouncers they will try to rejig their hard drives and thus destroy their computers. This will result from the confusion of 'bouncer' with 'policeman'. But to have policemen you have to have laws and to have workable laws you have to have consensus. The only consensus in the global internet community is that electricity exists. Maybe promoting the existence of electricity is the only political platform that will finally unite man and machine and render the virtual bouncers unnecessary. Certainly the bouncers themselves will soon be hoping that it will.