Dysexlics Rlue!

Solitary caterpillar,
suspended
‘pon a bending twig…

Just jokin’ with yer Chris, honest. You can put the knife down now.

Anyway, what follows is a rant. Deal with it. The reason for it is that I am trying to figure out what the issue is with me vis-à-vis the rest of the world: one of us has a problem, and I’m damn sure it isn’t me.

I give you Exhibit A, from the IT Situations Vacant section of my newspaper, where I keep encountering instances of acronymical vomitus, thus: 

SQL, IIS, ISA server. HTML and VRML. MCSE, ITIL, CCNE cert. rqd. SDLC knowledge prfd.

My lack of empathy for this sort of thing probably precludes employment in the IT business, as it seems your average techie likes nothing more than a couple of good, hard acronyms with his coffee to start the day. Now I’m all for acronyms in the right place and time, i.e. down the pub on a Friday night. I don’t know how I would have gotten through life without such evocative gems as TGIF, BFD and BYOB. But the truly geekly can wield the little buggers like a light sabre:
“Yeah, your QWERTY-board isn’t ISO standard and it’s PEBKAK-ing your RAM so the CPU and the HDD are sharing an IRQ with the CD-ROM and you need to RTFM for your PCB and LCD, see…”
Get thee to a pocket protector, Nigel.

Anyway, soon after that I received this text from a friend who really should have known better:

Hei bro! jzt chkn
ur dere tlk 2nite
eh cu l8r h8r!

This is not communication. This is the lower half of an eye chart.
I am gladly not part of the TXT generation. My thumb is way too big for the touch-sensitive nanosized keypads that are the result of a brain backfire by cellphone designers these days. In any case I dislike my sentences unpunctuated, nor my words abbreviated to within an inch of their lives.

And don’t even get me started on those hyperchic, ultratrendy, dance-muzaked “boutique” stores in my local mall, mocking me with names like TEMT and rabi and nVision and Xpress, catering to the facile gum-chewing Britney generation with ungrammatical misspellings for the sake of mindless fashion and drivelling design…
Excuse me for a moment. Nurse has told me to calm down and take my heart medication.

In any case, so far it appears that everybody else has the problem, not me. That was at least, until I found myself in front of my (cutting-edge wireless, ergonomic) keyboard, composing this:

Dear Ssir.
With refrence to your leter of the 15th, I wuold like to enquir ferther aboutt…

…ho-kay…
Mea culpa. Can’t blame anybody else for this, no matter how hard I try. So now I begin to suspect that perhaps it is not the rest of the world that has the problem. Perhaps it is, indeed - gulp - me.
Well if it is my problem, I’m damn well sure it is not my fault.

So in the tradition of internetted paranoiacs everywhere I went to that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia. Therein I discovered that I was not a pedantic, lazy, disagreeable curmudgeon, no sir. I have a condition. I am dyselx… I am dyspept… I am dyslexic.

Not the Friday night sort of dyslexic where you can’t read the advertising over the urinals because your forehead is pressed against the wall and it is the only thing that is keeping you upright.

Nor the more permanent kind where, because you couldn’t read the safety pamphlet on the aircraft, you don’t know how to tie your lifejacket and the other screaming passengers are just too damned rude to help you out.

Rather a more modern, transient sort, newly diagnosed by me: Techno-Dyslexia, defined as that cross-eyed confusion that manifests when the technology that is supposed to make our lives easier, insists that we must change to fit it's needs: for example when you try to use the abovementioned cellphone keypad, or perhaps when you're forced to wade through the novella-sized End User License Agreement before using your newly-installed piece of software, or maybe when you think you've finally deciphered the 2-point font in your DVD setup manual, you realise you're reading the bit that's written in Estonian.

It all makes sense now. That Wikipedia dyslexia entry was me in print. I mean, just look at the associated  symptoms:

• Poor personal organisation skills – you should see my desk.
• Difficulties with numeracy or arithmetic – that explains those heated discussions I’ve had with my bank manager.
• Left-right confusion – I couldn’t reverse into a car park if my life depended on it.
• Balance and co-ordination issues – yes, but only on a Friday night.
• Poor short-term memory – just ask anybody I’ve spoken to at a party. A goldfish has a better chance of remembering names than me.

There is also, according to Wikipedia, an association with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) - I think this post is evidence enough of that - Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) and Developmental Dyspraxia (DCD).
And there are those bloody acronyms again.

Of course, my new-found condition puts me in some serious company. Name pretty much anybody famous and there is a good chance that they're dyslexic, including:

• Scott Adams, Dilbert cartoonist - hero to cubicle dwellers everywhere,
• George Bush - and if you were to guess which one you’d likely be wrong, though it would explain a few things,
• Alexander Graham Bell - and I suspect he invented the telephone because he had the same feeling for telegrams that I have for TXTs,
• Robert Rauschenberg, artist – poor beggar, just writing his name must be a dyslexic’s version of hell, and,
• Albert Einstein – which makes me think that e=mc2 probably started life as Al's shopping list.

…not to mention great statespeople such as George Washington, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, George Patton, Winston Churchill, and Cher.

In fact Google tells me - and Google is never wrong - that around ten per cent of any population is likely to be dyslexic. Include Techno-Dyslexia and I'll wager we are in the majority now. We could rise up in revolt. We could write our own Techno-Dyslexic Bill of Rights - in 14 point, double spaced font. In fact I'm creating my Enemies List as we speak, and you can be sure that EULA authors, cellphone TXT designers and Estonian DVD manual creators are at the top of it.