The World's Cleverest Computer

by Alex J Allen

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Unfortunately, I don't have access to the Internet at work. Presumably, that's because they think I'd abuse that privilege and spend all day on Facebook, and who am I kidding? Of course I would. What I do get, however, is access to the intranet. Imagine if you turned on the TV and all the good cable channels were blocked off. No E4, no MTV, just the Parliament channel. Just you, alone with your thoughts, and the Parliament channel. Inevitably, a bit like when you're in a hotel in a foreign country and you attempt to make sense of a Spanish language soap, I tried to find something to look at on the intranet. Amazingly, I found something! It was called 'Take a Break', and there were games you could play. The trouble was, the computer I was playing against was some kind of Connect 4 genius. It started to seem like this was just work's way of breaking employee spirit. 'Oh I lose again, very sneaky diagonal computer, you've sure got my number'. But because there was literally nothing else to look at, I just sat there, losing, and feeling more and more frustrated. It was a completely pointless exercise, like when you stub your toe on a table leg and attempt to get retribution by kicking the shit out of the table, only serving to leave you more injured than you were in the first place. If it had been a fight in the street, of which I obviously have a wealth of experience, a friend would have held me back and told me wasn't worth it. But there was no friend, so I just ploughed on regardless, losing to this evil genius computer at everything, checkers, connect 4, battleships, I was shit at everything! What grated on me most was that this was disguised as fun. They might as well have played back to back charity appeal adverts, or even more depressing than that, episodes of My Wife and Kids. The intranet was only ever meant to be used for one thing, as a start page you're made to go on before you go off to look at more interesting things. Let's not start making pages that give users any false hope that their intranet could ever be anything more than that, it's a real spirit killer. I might even just get on with my work tomorrow, the whole episode has left me so disillusioned.