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Apple is busily creating the flashiest technology on the planet, and just as busily we carve it up with the coldest of technical analysis. Maybe we're all caught up in this technology mindset to the point that we've forgotten to have fun with it. Be sure to read the author's note at the end, though...
The Muffin Monster
by Del Miller
February 22, 2001
The convention hall is crammed with two-hundred trade show booths in tightly packed rows, flimsy facades of cardboard and felt gaudied up like chintzy bordellos and bathed in the migraine glare of halogen spots. Swoopy corporate logos and curiously obtuse mission statements blaze learingly across the backdrops, conferring a dubious, high-tech celebrity upon the odd bits of technological bric-a-brac velcroed to every vertical surface. In front of every booth is a folding table, skirted identically in blue, pleated satin and stacked with jargon filled brochures, business card holders and an imprint machine, all awaiting the rush of traffic when the show opens. In the corner of every booth, on an extruded aluminum pedestal, the inevitable electronic demo stands like some pagan shrine, colored LEDs flashing defectively in the storm of static electricity that sweeps through all trade shows.
Smack in the middle of the paper thin carpet that lines each booth, stand dark suited, over-groomed salesmen. Viewed from the end of the aisle, they look like penguins in a rookery, staking out their territories with fierce, friendly smiles and rocking eagerly back and forth in a tiny little dance of anticipated predation. They are loaded with data and armed with well honed sales pitches, intent on snatching their lawful prey as it gawks past their den of commerce. Here, the prey will be engineers; for this will be a high-technology, industrial trade show.
A high-tech industrial trade show is a marketplace of techno-esoterica, an underground bazzaar of arcane gizmos that comprise the modern infrastructure. The man on the street could scarcely imagine the complex bits of technology that underpin our existence. Here you find the equipment that measures ozone in the air, the tool that applies phospors to a CRT, the controller that guides the circuit board fab, the raw melt for fiber optics, the robots that build the circuit boards and, of course, the computers that control them all. For each of these products there is an underlying, more fundamental layer of industry that exists solely to provide the equipment, tools, controllers, materials and robots that supports it; and below that another layer still. The mind-boggling array of consumer products that we all see lining the store shelves and looming from roadside billboards is but the tip of an economic iceberg, dwarfed by the incomprehensibly vast markets that lie beneath the surface of our daily existence.
A thousand conversations will soon float through the ether, loaded with words like pH, and Volts, and Webers and Pascals. We technical sales types exude these terms from our pores, engaged in an alien language so specialized as to be opaque to the rest of the world. But we are at home here, surrounded by our own kind we are free to indulge in this technological babel, proud of our membership in this elite community. We wear the spiffy uniform of progress and we elevate ourselves with our own distinguished company.
But as the doors open and the engineers begin to amble slowly down the aisle, I look across at a booth that doesn't quite belong. Instead of a spiffy suited sales professional, there stands a blue jean garbed young man in sneakers and a baseball cap. He wears his name, Joe, stenciled across his shirt pocket like a car mechanic. He smiles happily, leaning casually on a massive piece of green painted machinery, evincing an air of untroubled detachment. Not at all professional, I think. The machine is the size of a refrigerator laid on its side, but built from thick, plate steel and graced with all the design elegance of a cheap anvil. Flanged and fitted like a battleship, and equipped with an electric motor as big as a washing machine the thing must weigh a ton. The rest of the booth is filled by a huge wooden crate filled with debris of the sort that might have come from a construction site.
On the side of the machine, in garish, comic font, is lettered "The Muffin Monster," along with the cartoon image of a dispeptic, Cookie Monster-like character. A placard on the floor tells me that The Muffin Monster is equipment for treating sewage. I regard The Muffin Monster with a frown: Apparently, it's sole purpose is to chew up whatever sort of "muffins" that might find their way down municipal sewers; the graphics I consider but briefly.
Now what is sewage treatment equipment doing in a high-tech environment like this? Did the marketing people at Joe's company have no idea of the high class nature of this trade show? Did they somehow think that people who make their living sorting electrons through microscopic gates might suddenly develop a keen interest in a sewage blender?
Poor, poor Joe
I suddenly feel sorry for poor, low-tech Joe. He would be lost here, underdressed and outclassed by the serious minded technologists, forced to sit by his sewage grinder for three days, completely ignored by the electronic engineer clientele, roaming the aisles on their profound quests.
My first customer approaches, eyeing the signage behind me and displaying the subtle body language that might commit him to actually approach. Just as he is about to take the fateful step in my direction, he catches a glimpse of The Muffin Monster in the corner of his eye. He stops, swivels, walks over to Joe and I hear him ask, "What the hell's a Muffin Monster?"
Joe smiles placidly and says, "It chews stuff up."
"Like, what kind of stuff?"
"Oh, just about any kind of stuff."
Joe's smile wraps around his face. He reaches into the debris bin and pulls out a big, beat up appliance carton, tosses it into the maw of The Muffin Monster and hits the power switch. The Muffin Monster growls to life and the carton flails about, accompanied by the precise sort of noise you would expect from the shredding of an appliance carton. Joe and the customer peer over the side until the cardboard confetti no longer spills out the bottom. The customer stands up and declares, "I'll be damned. What happens with rope?"
By now several engineers, who by education and professional orientation, should really have been over in my booth talking about my computers, are lined up around The Muffin Monster as Joe digs out a dozen feet of gnarly hawser as big as my forearm and throws it into the machine. Again the grinding noise and fluffy bits of fiber fall beneath. When it stops everyone draped over the edge shouts "Whoo-Hee!" and one of them yells, "Hey Joe, what about that big ol' boot?"
By now, the crowd around The Muffin Monster has swelled, blocking the entire aisle. All I can see of my potential customer base is their backs as they jostle for a front-row-center view of simulated sewage processing - like it was some girly show at a carnival. I can't stand it any longer and push my way through the crowd in time to see Joe toss a thick-soled lineman's boot into the most impressive rotating cuttlery I've ever seen. Dual steel shafts as big as my leg and hobbed into Tyrannosaur teeth, turn against each other with fluid precision. The teeth catch the the boot and reduce it into the molecular form of shoe as if it had been a warm piece of butter. I'm impressed.
I said, "Joe. Got a two-by-four in there?" In a flash, a four foot piece of lumber became a lumpy grade of sawdust. Someone in the crowd wagered his buddy that The Muffin Monster couldn't eat a brick. Joe, who is by now easing into the unlikely role of master showman, teases the crowd, who shout back at him. In goes the brick and with an awful crunching noise and a shower of red dust, the brick goes the way of cardboard, boot and lumber. The Muffin Monster gives me the impression that it could indeed chew up anything.
I ease out of the gallery and skulk back to my booth. Down the aisle I can see twin rows of concerned looking salesman, wondering where the customers are. The noise from across the way has attracted half the room to The Muffin Monster exhibit, and the aisle looks like a big day on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Joe is jumping up and down, playing the crowd and tossing in big rocks and pieces of angle iron. Horrific clankings and bangings emerge from The Muffin Monster, followed by huge cheers. A show-goer rolls in a spare tire from the parking lot to see if the Muffin Monster can handle it. It does.
For three days I watch Joe have far more fun than me, doing nothing more than feeding plaster statues, rebar and plumbing fixtures into The Muffin Monster, to the cheering approval of otherwise staid professionals. Nobody asks him about the chemical composition of the rotors, or the torque rating on the motor or the construction of the shaft seals. They just like to see The Muffin Monster chew stuff up.
Nobody has the slightest interest in computers.
It is a long three days.
Where's the party?
There are moments in one's life when it is appropriate to take stock; to let the grey matter ooze around the creaky underpinnings of your existence, to contemplate the fundamental questions of reality, such as: "Why am I not having as much fun as Joe?"
I feel like that now sometimes. Especially when I find myself caught up in the bits and bytes of computer technology. Oh sure, I still go all ga-ga over the latest technology and I read all the computer stories about the megahertz race and the stock prices of PC companies and I guess it's all pretty interesting, in an academic sort of way. But I can't help but feel that by burying myself in the minutia of the computing universe, that I'm missing something essential. Of course some of us have to take our computer laden world seriously; those that make a living from computers have a right to, of course, and admittedly, circuit-head talk has its own left-brained appeal. But life is short and serious enough all on its own without turning it into some sort of existentialist feature list.
This computing stuff needs to be fun in the good old fashioned way, the kind of fun that makes you say gosh or that causes a whoop when you fiddle with it. The grinning sort of fun I felt when I first played with a Macintosh sixteen years ago and, I must confess, like I still feel under the spell of a Jobsian keynote. This is the "chew stuff up" kind of thing that makes you happy to be part of it.
This digital world is nothing but ones and zeroes, dressed up in costumes of silicon and plastic and software, and if is going to be fun it sure helps to be wearing it's party clothes. Colorful computers, Bouncing Dock icons and morphing windows might seem frilly doodads to some, but to me they make computing seem alive again, like The Muffin Monster livened up a too-techy trade show. Being part of Apple's flashy world makes me seem a bit more like Joe and little less like the crisply starched techs, dealing in jargon and data.
It takes two to tango
Somehow, though, no sooner than the splashy rollout is over than the flaming Tiki-Torch of fun is quickly extinguished under a wet blanket of hypercriticism and hard-hearted specmanship that drags the entire party back into a DOS-ish world where all that counts is the numbers. Every color scheme and every interface nuance is picked apart with the cold detachment of the county coroner. Why do we do this?
Apple's new designs grab attention and light up the whole world of personal computing. The folks at Apple spend a lot of time dressing up the Macintosh in its fancy duds and they do it for our pleasure. We should glory in every last bit of novelty and revel in the hubbub that this different thinking creates. The alternative appears to be a rather drab PC world that consists only of machines and code.
We might all do better to be a little more like Joe; let's have fun with this stuff.
###
Author's Note: I wrote this story before the recent Tokyo MacWorld, and hence before the unveiling of the flowery, polka-dotted iMacs. This drops me squarely into a bit of a moral dilemma - either I have to revel in these new "colorful" expressions of computing fun, as I preached in the story, or else I must admit that Apple's latest creation is the most absurd thing I've seen since Michael Dukakis donned a tank helmet.
Now, it is entirely possible that those smart folks at Apple know exactly what they are doing and that there are abundant good reasons for slapping a flower power motif on a computer. That I haven't the slightest, flipping idea what those reasons could be, is quite possibly my own problem. But how do I justify such an attitude in light of my Muffin Monster defense of party colored computers?
So, dear reader, any advice you may offer me on dealing with my hypocrisy, would be most welcome.
--Del
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The Muffin Monster is a trademark of JWC Environmental
Copyright 2001, Del Miller. All rights reserved.
Del
Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com
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