Bottom's Dream...

We've all been there. It comes home to us every time we come face to face with a technological wonder. We respect it, because we don't understand it. We fear it, because we don't understand it. And then, there come those days that we begin to hate it, because we don't understand it. Soon, what was once considered a tool and a rather impersonal means of efficiency becomes our arch-nemesis, a fiend from well, you know, sent to tease and torture us. This goes for most modern machinery (copiers, cell phones, cars, alarm systems...), but there is something really special about the computer and all its minions. What is it in us that doesn't give these things a second thought when they go right, but will automatically take it personally when the 'deus ex machina' decides that it doesn't like your disk, and therefore will not read it; or pretend that it is not connected to the Internet, especially when it is most particularily needed; or when it thinks that it knows English grammar far better than we do? Why do we thus attribute free will to a conglomeration of wires and plastic? Why does the genius of man always seem so good at making him look utterly foolish? I cannot feign to answer these burning questions - at least, rationally; however, I will venture to say that the real answer does not reside in technology so much as it actually frolics in it. The revelation? Puck lives.
He lives in the wires, he hides behind icons, he dances on disks and desktops. He connives with the speakers, he dabbles with printers, he thinks he's king of the Web. He laughs when we're angry and snickers when not - in the hopes that we soon will be. He pours his rare brew over all we thought true about Word, and stirs up mutiny among the toggles. The Tab stops (or are they?) form the notes on his flute, to play upon when he gets bored. The botched-up formats, lost servers, long e-mail compositions that have dropped unexpectedly into the abyss - it's all his doing; no wonder we go out of our head, appropriating all sorts of names and/or nefarious powers to what should be a perfectly amiable piece of machinery. But, deluding the senses is exactly what Puck does best and, at our best, all we can do when the madness has past is simply look back upon the whole ordeal as if it were just a strange dream...one that is maybe meant to make us realize something about ourselves that perhaps we lost sight of in the light of our heightened sense of ingenuity and all around mental prowess. Then, in the moment when the motherboard has finally crashed and smoke begins to rise from the CPU, we can step back with club in hand and, in the hazy aftermath, find ourselves again...
"I have had a most rare
vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to
say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go
about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there
is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and
methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if
he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye
of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not
seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue
to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream
was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of
this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream,
because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the
latter end of a play, before the duke:
peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall
sing it at her death."