PC Loadletter?

I think the world would be a better place if we had the capacity to make inanimate objects feel shame. How often do we yell at each other because we're upset about something for which there is no outlet? After attempting to reheat leftovers and burning them we can't scream "YOU WERE AN ACCIDENT, YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO EXIST!" and feel better about it. Instead, when someone asks us how our dinner is, we say "Shut the fuck up, Aunt Beth." We victimize each other in an attempt to avoid culpability, when really we should be blaming things that can't retaliate to avoid culpability.

When you stand at a jammed copy machine, and it blinks its red light at you and mockingly beeps, you still go "Christ, fucking shit-thing!" and the look around guiltily. Because you look stupid for having gotten upset at a piece of office equipment. But what if the copy machine started stammering and apologizing? Suddenly ashamed that it screwed up its job? That would be fantastic. I probably wouldn't be angry. I'd roll my eyes and be like "Oh copier, you're so ridiculous. Spit it ouuuttt...." Unless the copier was needy and overly apologetic. Then we'd be back where we started.

Or when your phone drops a call. And you're left standing there, doing everything you can to not throw it into the nearest wall, dreading the next three minutes when each caller tries to call the other consecutively only to get predictably busy signals on both ends. I wish I could just talk to my phone "Wow that was a shitty thing you just did, I'm going to let your battery die later, you little T9 craphatch." It will be like when parents make excuses because of their small children. "Oh sorry I flaked out of the thing at the place that we had planned, my wireless router forgot that it actually gets the internet pumped directly into it and it simply needs to spray it all over the house, so i had to...remind...it."

And unlike people, if you ever do such a lousy job berating your inanimate objects that they become depressed to the point of not wanting to function at all, you can just throw them away and get new ones. Ideally they would just throw themselves away when they become useless. TOASTER SUICIDE. But instead, I will continue to stare bewildered at the microwave buttons that don't work, jamming my thumb into them harder and harder, because that has to fix them.

If only we could treat machines the way we treat each other. That is to say, terribly.