"Circular logic"

Maybe it's just my dorky sense of humor, but I thought this was kind of funny. The back-story was that I couldn't restore a database to the server running on my workstation, and our inimitable Sys. Admin. quickly deduced that I was behind on upgrades. He pointed me to the right installation packaged, then noticed that I had two client connections open to different database servers: "You probably want to close SQL Management Studio...or it will be sad."

I snickered in appreciation of the "it will be sad" euphemism. But I also found it humorous that even somone who groks hardware and software at a level my pretensions will never manage still anthrpomorphizes computers like (almost) everyone else. We humans, when faced with something we cannot completely understand and/or control, seem to like casting it in our own image--as if that somehow will improve our relationship with it. On its own plane, there's a logic to such thinking; it's just that such logic and the logic of physics and Math and Computer Science have nothing to do with each other. Yet it is what it is.

The underlying irony, of course, is that our understanding and mastery of ourselves is, at best, shaky. And so foisting "humanity" upon machinery probably isn't the wisest thing we could do. In some senses, it's taking the elements of unpredictability and unreliability and bringing them full circle, isn't it? Maybe that's something to keep in mind the next time your workstation or home computer is "being stupid."