The magician (shaman, priest, witch doctor, ‘holy person’, IT coordinator) traditionally holds power over his flock through their belief in his ability to influence the seen and unseen worlds (hardware, software including OS). I refer to the magician as male but this is merely for brevity, only a few die-hards exclude women from their beliefs nowadays.
When a member of the flock needs help they call on the magician to offer advice or even a spell. The magician engages in inscrutable rituals and incantations to affect either the seen or unseen world, the majority of the flock care not what any of it means, they just want their cow to give milk, their wife to bring forth sons, their Word table to stay on one page of the document. Magician wannabes will peer over their shoulder trying to gain entry to the unseen world (password) or scribbling down the spells in the hope that they will be able to repeat them. They won’t.
The magician never says I can’t do that, only it can’t be done. There is a natural order to things (permissions, security settings) which can not be disturbed (edited).
The rituals, spells and incantations are based on ancient manuscripts in strange languages (manuals, help files), experience (Windows 3.1), exotic vocabulary derived from ancient cultures (dos, ASP) and magician’s covens (edugeek et al). When they don’t work the failure is usually blamed on an outside force such as powerful spells cast by another malevolent wizard (virus), an all-powerful demon intent on evil (hacker), neglect by the victim (have you installed AV, defragged, cleared your cookies, used P2P, not switched to Firefox?). Other belief systems are openly, often viciously, derided (Linux, Acorn) or at best tolerated as having some merit but not being quite right for all occasions (Mac). There are frequent wars and deep, lingering resentments on all sides.
The magician has noticed that sometimes he can actually change things, even bring them back to life (re-boot) and endlessly seeks to ensure that rituals are carried out in exactly the right way, in the right order, with the right emphases, accompanied by the correct chants similarly ordered. Occasionally he will shake bones or hang bunches of animal bits and/or vegetation over the prostrate body of a victim (running utilities, resetting profiles, virus scans). In some cases a sacrifice is called for to appease the gods (reformat, reinstall). Whenever something works he will try to repeat the process, without any idea as to why it worked or why things went wrong in the first place but he will explain it to the innocent in terms of energy flow, Chi, grace, higher purpose, appeasement (power surge, stability, Service Pack, malware etc). This is because the Creator (known to initiates simply as Bill) works in mysterious ways, his purpo$e$ are unknown but if we fail to honour him we shall be cast out (blue screen of death, black for the purgatory awaiting those who may yet be ‘safe’).
There are pretenders - PC world assistants, ‘my brother’s mate who built his own PC’, the dreaded ‘partner who works in IT’- who claim to know of the rituals but can actually wreak havoc dabbling with things they don’t really understand.
The magician is not necessarily a charlatan, although he is usually badly dressed.
3 comments:
Excellent. I love this bit: "Other belief systems are openly, often viciously, derided (Linux, Acorn) or at best tolerated as having some merit but not being quite right for all occasions (Mac). There are frequent wars and deep, lingering resentments on all sides."
Do you know my tecnician?!
mmmmmm is all i can say, too much time on one's hands!
"IT Co-Ordinator" :laughs out loud: (because an IT Co-Ordinator isn't IT literate enough to know what that means! ;))
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