Getting back into a work groove after a three-week break proved to be a bit of a shock to the system this year.
Having grown accustomed to languorous mornings playing with my cats and dog, walking in the garden, planting hibiscuses and making delicious meals, finding myself back in a chair in front of a computer connected to the Internet required some adjustment.
I did download my mail at home, and even played a little bit of the latest Myst, but I don`t think I sat in front of a computer for a stretch longer than an hour-and-a-half. This got me thinking of the geeks out there who seize the opportunity the holidays present to spend days playing computer games and surfing the Net uninterrupted by work requirements.
I`ve worked with these kinds of people, I`ve been friends with these kinds of people, and I even had a person like this as a tenant in my house for a while.
I know they live by the tenet that if e-mail can be sent then personal contact is unnecessary. Thinking about how these types spend their holidays made me realise that confronted with time away from their computers, they would be likely to go through the same shock as I am feeling being back at work.
Reintegration is the key
I have hatched a plan to try and reintegrate geeks into normal life. Instead of hiring programmers to try to get the virtual world to more closely resemble reality, I think geeks could benefit from having reality more closely resemble a computer game or their desktops.
I think geeks could benefit from having reality more closely resemble a computer game or their desktops.
Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm
Their entire households could be equipped with sensor panels that make hissing sounds every time they walk through doors. The steering wheel of their car could be equipped with a gamepad-type manual control that allows them to make shooting noises (inside the car only) as they pass pedestrians. Specialist organisations could be hired to train pets and garden wildlife like birds and beetles to move in regular patterns, replicating computer-generated creatures.
The real challenge would be presented by the necessity to interact with real people, but I believe this could be successfully managed by installing a few actors in the proximity of the geeks` houses and their nearest shops who deliver vital pieces of information in short, predetermined bursts of speech that can be repeated for convenience, in case the geek didn`t get it the first time round.
I think the real problem would lie in the lack of excitement presented by the real world. There are no guns to be seized, villains to be shot or puzzles to be solved. And there certainly aren`t dozens of buxom women in scanty clothes waiting tables or fighting the forces of darkness.
In spite of all of this, I think my plan would work. And I definitely think there`s a market for the gadgets that this would create.
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