There Always Has To Be A Scapegoat ¤Frankenstein¤

It seems that most of us are forever willing to blame our shortcomings on something or someone. As kids, we blamed the dog for eating our homework. When we just didn't feel like going to school for some reason, we blamed our absense on some mysterious illness. When we broke things, we blamed our siblings or the neighbor kids. Placing the blame is a habit that most of us develop early in life.

As adults, we blame the alarm clock for not going off when we're late for work. We blame the post office when our payments don't get to their destinations by the due dates. We blame our coworkers when things are left undone and we blame our boss for being so cheap when we can't stay within our budgets. Placing the blame is a life-long habit for many of us.

Now, there's a new scapegoat. As a matter of fact, I like to think of it as the villain of the new millenium. I'm talking about computers. If you listen to people, computers are to blame for every little thing that goes wrong. I read a news article today which told of a woman who had mistakenly overpaid her taxes by a couple of dollars. Apparently, the computer couldn't differentiate between over and under-payment so she was sent a bill for about a hundred dollars. Another story detailed how a person had requested a single phone book but, instead, was sent nine hundred of them. Shouldn't someone along the line have caught such an obvious mistake? It doesn't take a genius to know that nobody needs that many phone directories. If nothing else, I would think someone in the shipping department would have questioned the order. Who do you blame if you're over-charged at the grocery store? The computer, of course. The item didn't scan right.

I don't think we'll ever need another scapegoat. Computers are so good at taking the blame for every little thing, that may not ever need a replacement. I would make this post longer and more interesting but this computer is acting up. It's all AOL and Bill Gates' fault.

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