Ilined up the snacks and drinks a couple of Saturdays ago to watch the Penn State-Iowa football game on TV.
When my son and I turned on the set at the appointed hour, the audio of the Penn State game was playing, but the picture was of a game between Texas A&M and Oklahoma. After a few frantic minutes, a crawl appeared on the screen indicating the station was aware of the "crossed signal" and was fixing it. A couple of minutes later, the problem was reversed: We were getting Penn State video and Texas A&M game audio. And a few minutes later, the station went completely to the Texas A&M game, audio and video, causing us to trudge off in the direction of the nearest bar with a satellite dish. (The station general manager wrote in an e-mail a few days later that a snafu with new equipment caused the glitch.)
Ultimately, my alma mater, Penn State, lost, ruining hopes for a national championship. So maybe Channel 2 was just trying to be kind and insulate me from disappointment.
But the incident stuck with me when the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report Sunday evening about user frustrations with computers, especially at home.
The "crossed signals" for the football game were frustrating, because you don't expect something like that with TV. It's virtually always reliable. Same with electricity, as BGE often reminds us when severe winter weather knocks out the power. And telephones, too, for that matter; or at least before they went cellular.
But people have more of a love-hate relationship with their computer, which often makes them feel more ignorant or powerless than other modern technologies do. The conflict gets played out in multimillion dollar TV campaigns from Apple and Microsoft that portray the PC as dork or hero. Computer frustrations have spawned a cottage industry of souvenirs, from T-shirts to office gag gifts.
Half of the adults who responded to the recent Pew study said that when using their computers or cell phones, they usually need someone to help them set up a new device or show them how to use it. About 44 percent said their Internet connection at home had failed to work properly during the previous year, 39 percent said their computer or laptop failed to work during that time frame and 29 percent said the same about their cell phones. Only 15 percent had that complaint about their iPod or MP3 player.
