Computer Nazi

Where I used to work we had a Computer Nazi. Although she worked in marketing, she was the closest thing we had at that time to an IT department, and she took this ancillary position very seriously.

Anne had an air of long-suffering patience when it came to dealing with computer problems. To her, we were all a bunch of untrained monkeys, fooling around with expensive pieces of equipment we had no business fooling around with. This, she was convinced, was the source of all our computer troubles -- woefully inadequate personnel using machines that had higher IQs than we did. Indeed, given our level of ineptitude, it must have seemed to her a miracle that we did not have more computer problems.

Her list of computer don'ts was long. Do not use screen savers. Do not pile papers on the CPU. Do not keep it too hot in your office. Do not keep your computer on overnight. Above all, do not play Stress Reliever Paintball.

This was a program someone had sent around when the organization was going through a particularly stressful time, financially and in other ways. When you loaded the program, a ray gun would appear on the screen. You could choose a color, take aim at an annoying document -- say, a memo from administration informing you that raises would be nonexistent this year -- and fire away. Big splotches of brightly colored paint would fill the screen. It was a very satisfying way of taking out your frustration, particularly with authors who didn't know their too from their to. We had great fun with it.

But the Computer Nazi instantly denounced the paintball program as evil, declaring that it used up valuable memory space. She sent out a memo that directed us, in no uncertain terms, to immediately delete the program from our computers. Anyone found with it would face instant death. She suggested that if we were truly stressed out -- and here her tone suggested that no one could be more stressed out than she, given the incompetents she had to deal with at work -- we should look for other methods of coping that did not involve our computers, such as physical exercise, or even counseling. She graciously recommended a few counselors. And because we knew that Anne had our best interests at heart -- and because she had us all cowed -- we bowed to her demands and wiped Stress Reliever Paintball off our computers. But first, we squirted her memo with it.

But though we rolled our eyes at Anne behind her back, she was not so easy to defy in person. When she had to be called in about a computer problem, the Computer Nazi took full command. We melted away when she came, giving her free reign with our errant computers while we stayed far enough away to discourage any tongue-lashings, for it was a foregone conclusion that whatever was wrong was our fault. And always after she had worked on someone's computer, the desktop icons would be rearranged, as if she believed we were too stupid to know where they should go.

I was terrified of Anne. When something went wrong with my computer I tried everything to fix it without contacting her. This included, but was not limited to, banging on the computer, muttering dark threats at it, pleading with it, and finally, weeping and praying over it. I would have anointed it with oil, in the biblical tradition, if I had thought doing so would heal it and save me from having to call Anne in.

For months she refused to put Microsoft Word on my computer, declaring it unnecessary since the foundation used WordPerfect. With great trembling and trepidation, I attempted to explain that most of our authors sent manuscripts in Word and it seemed, therefore, important that I be able to open them. She was unmoved. In her eyes I was too incompetent to have a second word processing program on my computer; it would only give me another chance to screw something up. There were other people in the department who had Word, and if I received a file I could not open, I could just send it to one of them, and they could save it in WordPerfect for me and send it back. It did not matter to her that this would cause a degree of inconvenience to both me and the other person, or that it would waste time. It would not waste computer memory, and that was what mattered.

And so I fought back in the only way I knew how: I posted a Dilbert comic strip that featured a character who was the full embodiment of Anne the Computer Nazi, except that the cartoon Nazi wore a little Russian hat that Anne would not have been caught dead in. At the height of her reign, I taped this comic strip on our department's refrigerator. I don't know whether Anne ever read it -- she did not seem the type to indulge in such frivolities -- but if she did, it's unlikely she saw herself in it. People like her never see themselves as obsessive. Nevertheless, I felt immensely better for having put it there. Viva la monkeys! I would say defiantly each time I saw it -- in a whisper, in case Anne was nearby.