Survival of the weakest
September 2010 |
|
Tweet |
|
With this theory of evolution came the concept of natural selection; survival of the fittest. Those that are able to adapt to the changing environment are more likely to survive. This is fine except that the problem now is it’s becoming easier for the weak to survive in the current environment. The race of intelligent beings have made life for the weak easy by creating technological comforts that mean the idiots of the world don’t have to rely on themselves for anything. Advances in medicine mean that they can be cured of most diseases and if all else fails they can rely on an intelligent professional to look after them.
Stupid people are like a virus. Basically the idiots of this world are putting more pressure on – and sucking the life out of - the bright individuals which is resulting in the slow deterioration of the intelligent population. In other words, I am now an endangered species.
This scary thought leads me to examine the most dangerous of species; the main killer of intelligent man. I am talking of course about the molestus populus, more commonly known as the customer.
Back when I first started building websites for people, it was a relatively simple task. Someone would phone up and ask for a website. Our designer would finish smoking his spliff and then design something pretty. I would then write all the wizardry bits of code to make the site work and allow the customer to update the contents from a nice and secure administration area.
It was an easy life back then. Very rarely would there be any more to it. The boss would invoice them and they would happily go about their business. Very occasionally I would get a phone call from someone asking if I could explain one or two aspects of the site that they couldn’t get their heads around. That was fine because they were usually good questions.
However, things have somewhat changed since then. I’m not sure whether it is a result of people becoming too used to having things done for them or because modern technology has given people the impression they are cleverer than they actually are but people seem to be less able to grasp even the most simple concepts these days. Personally I think it is down to a simple case of genetic degeneration. Or to put it another way people are just becoming more and more stupid.
I am building things in almost exactly the same way as I did 10 years ago. Better in fact; more intuitive, easier to navigate, better looking. Yet when I hand something over to a customer now, they can’t get their simple minds around it. People want me to input the content for them, they want me to spend a day down at their office teaching them how to use the system, most of the time they want to be able to click their fingers and for the system to make things appear by magic. The number of times I get someone phoning up to ask something like “I can’t find where to view my list of customers.” Is beyond belief and I’m finding it more and more difficult not to sound patronising when I ask them if they have tried clicking on the link that says ‘view customers’. Sometimes they have and claim they just wanted to make sure. Oh for heaven’s sake, use your initiative.
A few years ago, before Google Analytics made all other web stats programs obsolete, I developed a nice little program that I gave to all our customers. One of the reports on there told the customer which countries their visitors came from. For whatever reason, I couldn’t identify the location of all of them. For these entries I simply displayed the words “Unknown”. One afternoon I had a phone call from a customer asking me where people from “unknown” came from. I was speechless. So much so that all I could do was email her back with the dictionary definition of the word.
Other annoying questions usually relate to a customer’s computer. I’m often phoned up by people informing me that they can’t send email or can’t get onto the internet or their computer just won’t boot up. What the hell has that got to do with me? I build your website for goodness sake. People just assume that, because it is on the computer, it somehow controls everything.
More recently I have started rolling out a product that I’ve handed to a couple of clients so they can beta test it for me - free of charge obviously. On the face of it this was a good idea. A customer is more likely to identify missing things and bugs because they are approaching it from a different point of view that the developer. Plus they will be the ones ultimately using it so their feedback is good.
However, despite making it very clear that this was still very much in development and it was a beta product, both customers decided they would use the thing in a live environment. I am now getting several phone calls every day where they proceed to tell me the product doesn’t work but don’t give me any constructive feedback. Well what the hell do you expect? It’s not live yet. You’re testing it for us! What kind of imbecile beta tests stuff in a live environment anyway?
So was Darwin right about evolution? I only ask because it seems to me that the human race is devolving at an alarming rate. More worrying is the fact that as fewer and fewer intelligent people are surviving, the weak and terminally stupid will soon have no one to rely on and will die out soon after us. This leaves us with the scary prospect of extinction or the even scarier prospect of Janet Street-Porter and Gordon Brown as the next Adam and Eve and the human race devolving further into a Barracuda/Sloth hybrid.
Still, I’m hoping to disprove the theory of evolution. After all, Darwin married his cousin so he was obviously just a little bit strange.
