Love Bytes : Women Have Platonic Relationships With Their Computers. Men Have Torrid Affairs.
WILL YOU TURN THAT damn computer off and come to bed?” I beg my husband. It’s midnight, and he’s been fooling around with his new modem for the past five hours. I’m beginning to wish that I was a pocket-size 1,200-baud transmitter.
“In a minute, honey,” says Duke, who said the same thing a couple of hours ago. “I just want to figure out this glitch in the automatic hang-up.”
I know better than to suggest that he wait until morning and call the computer help line. While I tend to view my computer as a somewhat faithful servant (who has the disconcerting habit of calling in sick at the worst possible moment), Duke views his computer as a wild animal that he alone must tame.
But I’m not the first woman to fall asleep to a lullaby of computer beeps. Recently, the New York Times reported that “women and girls use computers; men and boys love them.” According to the Times: “While legions of women work with computers in their jobs and many excel as computer scientists and programmers, they are almost without exception bystanders in the passionate romance that men conduct with these machines.”
Many of these romances seem more like fatal attractions. (If women were so entranced, there would be a self-help book out: “Women Who Compute Too Much.”) My friend Rob, for example, is having a torrid affair in a walk-in closet. “I can go in there and sit in front of the computer and look up and discover that it’s four hours later,” says Rob, who sometimes plays the game “Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards” with his computer until 2 or 3 in the morning.
And he doesn’t just spend time on his Compaq Deskpro; he spends money. “I covet things that I have absolutely no use for,” Rob admits. “I realize that the fact that another CPU down the street can do 32 megahertz at the flash of a keystroke is irrelevant. But I still want to have the hottest computer on the block.” Why? “For a man, a computer is a car equivalent.”
No kidding. My friend Monica’s husband actually turned their garage--”where you used to be able to park cars,” she laments--into an enclosed, insulated, carpeted computer shrine. “You know what he gets into?” marvels Monica, a computer widow. “The table that his computer stuff sits on. It can’t just be a table from a store. It has to be a nuclear-age, computer-material table.”
“I’m a computer stud,” her husband, Jack, proudly proclaims. Jack, a systems programmer who modifies software, feels that his technological wizardry gives him an edge over ordinary computer hackers. “I’m a lot more manly than most men who deal with computers,” he says. “To me, everyone who isn’t a stud is like a housewife--and that includes men and women.”
Luckily, Monica is resigned to sharing her stud with a silicon rival. “I think that when Jack gave the computer a phone line that used to be mine, I got my first clue,” she says with a laugh.
Some women aren’t laughing. “Many women get very jealous when their husband brings home a new computer,” says Chaytor D. Mason, a USC associate professor who studies the psychological aspects of the work environment. “It’s almost as if he has a girlfriend. He’s totally enthralled. His wife gets no attention. She goes to bed alone and cold.” (All the while, wondering, what does he see in it?)
“I think part of the computer’s allure to a man is mastery,” Mason says. “Here’s this thing staring him in the face. Can he get control over it? He’s looking for self-proof, and after that, the feelings of excitement and victory will begin to fade. If a wife can stand the period of isolation and see it as a passing phase, she may be a little more understanding.”
She’ll be more understanding if she has her own computer. A computer can turn a self-sufficient woman into a damsel in distress faster than it can delete a critical file.
“I think women have been taught to be fearful of machines,” says Constance Ahrons, associate director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at USC. “We use machines cautiously, just wanting them to service us. But men like to tinker with them; they’re very interested in how the whole computer works. I don’t know how my computer works,” Ahrons confesses. “I know my program. I just pray that it works all the time. If something goes wrong, I have to find a man.”
Me, too. “Help!” I cry. My husband rushes into the office to see what’s wrong. I hand him a computer printout of what’s supposed to be the final draft of this story. There are four crisply typed pages of gibberish. “My computer is speaking in tongues,” I wail frantically.
“Did you check the connection?” Duke asks calmly. Yes, five times. I also triple-checked the software and every button on the printer, but I watch expectantly as my husband checks it all again. Computers often recover miraculously the minute a man starts whispering sweet binary nothings.
Not this time. “It’s not printing the right characters,” Duke informs me, as if I didn’t already know. My anxiety mounts as he hooks up his computer to the printer, prints out a file and sighs with relief as the text comes out in English. “It’s not the printer,” he says happily. “It must be your computer.”
This is why I don’t love computers. I call the computer store. “Nobody else has this problem,” says the salesman, who has never understood anything I’ve ever said except my Visa number. It turns out that the only person who can fix my laptop is in Buena Park. I can spend three hours driving it there and then another three hours picking it up, or I can spend $80 on a messenger. I opt for the messenger.
Later, the computer doctor calls and tells me that I can have the computer back in a week for $100 or he can fix it overnight for $150. I feel as if I’m a contestant on “Let’s Make a Bad Deal.”
But this is the price you pay for computer dependency. The following evening, I’m frantically pounding the keyboard on my newly repaired laptop, trying to finish this story so I can pay for its upkeep. At midnight, Duke knocks on my office door. “Will you turn that damn computer off and come to bed?” he begs.
