Usability (A short story)

God damn, how can we even consider releasing something like this? We should just scrap him.

We can't. The dev team will go nuts; they've spent years on this one; all those delays, the resources...

Doesn't mean we can't cut our losses now. Forget about this and reassign the programmers to someone more promising.

Promising? We all thought he was going to be the next big thing! The RL Chiang of the West; heck, he was suppose to crush the Chinese models. Everybody bought the hype. Maybe that was the problem. The devs worked on the hype instead of on what's in front of them. Their managers should have kept their heads down, instead of blabbering about him on all the forums.

Who cares what went wrong? He's still a completely unusable piece of crap.


Maybe it's not so bad; we'll just have marketing dress him up a bit and bundle in a free data-miner imprint or something.

No no no. He has been rejecting all the imprints. Somehow he's not backward compatible with any of the old protocols; my team has been...

Incompatible? What about the standard Office package?

We've tried that. He has office, media, all the basics loaded up, even the advanced math and science modules, but none of it runs right. He would start out fine, but after a few minutes the performance goes to hell and he starts looking comatose.

The devs said they built him on a new set of mental architecture. Not clear what exactly that means.

It means they don't understand him. Bloat. It's all the bloat he's been accumulating, and none of it is useful. He's taking up a huge chunk of memory and resources, lagging in everything he does, but none of the devs know where all those cycles are going. It's like there's a black hole in his head sucking up all the productivity. He's sucking up a lot of bandwidth too. There are gigs of info shuffled away in there, and more downloading every day. Mason says he got it under control but I think he hasn't a damn clue.

At least he's stable, right?

For now at least. Don't forget the last time he flipped out and stopped responding for three weeks.

I heard.

My entire team did nothing except trying to guess the exact sequence of events that crashed him. I almost got into a fist fight with Steve when he tried to blame it on me. I mean, who the hell knows! It could be a traumatic childhood incident, it could a fried capacitor, it could be the god damn weather. I'm a QA engineer, not a psychoanalyst! Listen...

I'm listening.

Listen! Have you seen him lately? They put in this feature that's suppose to make him more self-secure, but it's driving me insane. Whenever we ask him to do something, he goes "why do we need to?" and "is this the right thing to do?" and "maybe you should think about reconsidering this a bit more after you run some simulations and look at all the variables". Makes me want to slap him, you know, just shut up and do what I say.

You know you can turn that feature off.

Yes, the completely undocumented, eight step process, hidden by two layers of unrelated pscyho-bullshit and him asking "are you're sure you want to do that" every single step of the way! Oh I'm sure the users will work that out.

Users will always find something to bitch about.

That's no excuse. We're suppose to give them something that just *works*, not something that wants to sit around all day thinking and asking stupid questions.

Wants to? Don't we tell him what to want?

No, you're not... you don't get it. He's sapping other people's productivity too. I caught a log of him debating with one of my testers about, get this, about whether or not songs written by a program is actually music - for two HOURS! That was the last straw. Last fucking straw. She tried to pass it off as "testing his logic module" or some bullshit too. Unbelievable.

Heh. Did you fire her?

Oh, on the spot.

Hmm. You're right. Scrap the whole project. He's worse than worthless. Just get him out of here. I'll talk to Mason.

Damn right. Shoulda done it long ago.

---

She took his arm as they walked outside.

"That was easier that I expected."

"Yes." He pulled her closer.

"So, where shall we go?" she asked. Her breath condensed in the cool air.

The sunlight imparted a soft luster to his face that she had never seen before, and his smile was full of possibilities.

"Let's go exploring!"