I just witnessed first hand the sort of computer use experience that I hear people talking about all the time but, thankfully, am mostly sheltered from.

It was a recent looking chassis running some recent looking variant of Windows. I laugh to find that I cannot actually recognise Windows releases anymore, but this one had a big green "Start" button, so I presume this means XP or Vista.

The person was struggling to complete a task that really should not have been that hard, but Windows was slow and unresponsive (this of course could have been down to either the machine itself or network latency), and he responded to this by repeating the requests he was making of the operating system, on some occasions at least 3 additional times, rather than waiting for the first request to complete, while randomly hitting keys (that I couldn't see had any actual instructive use, but rather was just a way to express anger), and yelling at it, while waving his arms about.

I sat in silence, knowing that any comment I could possibly have would be misunderstood or at any rate, not helpful. At one point, he actually asked me, "why is it so slow?" to which I mumbled sympathetically.

It really amazes me that this is the quality of some people's interactions with their computers. It is so far from my own experiences with computers, where 99% of the time when something isn't working I know why, how to work around it, or how to fix it. In general my approach to breakages with computers resemble a challenge for me to solve, sometimes a frustrating one, but no more so than a complicated problem I'm interested in solving. Certainly the computer is not a black box that I am forced to use and loathe doing so.

I am at least mostly convinced that this person's problem was because he was using Windows, although of course there are some people who just don't have an aptitude with computers, no matter what.