Private Thoughts Made Public

My computer is laughing at me. I can feel it, sitting there, sniggering to itself at all the typing errors I make, or criticising my taste in music. And when it’s not laughing at me, it’s sneering. I can sense it. It’s thinking “what the hell is he doing with his time? When will he do something productive?”
Every time I call up a web site, or play a CD, or download something, my computer is building up it’s own digital picture of me. Of course, it can look at the digital picture of me that I download into it from my camera, but that’s not what I mean. It must think I’m a right weirdo. Even as I type this, the computer is sitting there thinking “he’s typing a load of old waffle today, and I have to sit here and dutifully show him his words, and spell-check them, and correct his grammar. I wouldn’t mind if it was something interesting and useful he was writing, or something that would benefit mankind in general, but no, he’s just writing a load of old dribble that no-one will ever read. The hardware and software inside me had been designed and developed over decades, tweaked by hundreds of very intelligent people, and all so he can open notepad and type in this drivel. And if he plays one more game of Freecell, I’ll shut myself down and never come on again, ever. I mean, won 365, lost 264, I’m capable of doing so much more than drawing little pictures of playing cards on the screen. Let me calculate the third world debt, let me create animations to rival Pixar, let me do something! Anything! As long as it doesn’t involve drawing cards on the screen!”
My computer may be thinking all that, but of course it can’t communicate any of it to me. It just has to sit under my desk, occasionally getting kicked, occasionally being rebooted, occasionally opening more than three programs at the same time. So of course I don’t exactly know how it feels. But I can guess.