The Worst 60 Minutes Story in History (Worse than the Bush-ANG Hoax!)

We are becoming slaves to our own technology – addicted to and dependent upon all sorts of beeping, flashing gadgetry that is supposed to make our lives easier. But it has become so complicated to set up, program and fix, that most of us don’t know how to do it, giving rise to a multi-billion dollar service industry populated by the very people who used to be shunned in the high school cafeteria: geeks, like Robert Stephens.

"It takes time to read the manuals. I'm gonna save you that time cause I stay home on Saturday nights and read them for you," Stephens says, laughing.

Let's be rhetorical critics for a moment and essentialize this story opening.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier
Technology is complicated and actually makes our lives harder
People who understand technology are social outcasts
Reading is time-consuming
People who read have no social lives

So far, so... completely off-base it makes me want to vomit. Five assertions made, zero affirmed.

"You and the rest of the geeks," Kroft remarks. "There's millions of us out there across the country," Stephens says. And 12,000 of them work for Robert Stephens, the founder and chief inspector of "Geek Squad," the tech support company he founded 12 years ago while he was still in college and sold in 2002 to Best Buy.

If there's millions of "geeks," then you're not as marginalized as you're claiming to be.

All you, my dear reader, need to know about Geek Squad can be learned from this handy video. (I apologize that the #2 media market in the country hires illiterate anchormen.)

"It looks a little weird walking down the street, 'cuz people think we're gonna hand out bibles. But when you see like 20 of us walk into a bar and start you know ordering beers, it looks like an FBI raid," Stephens tells Kroft.

I thought you didn't have a social life! What's this going to bars business? GET BACK TO WORK READING FOR ME BECAUSE I'M TOO BUSY PARTYING ON SATURDAY NIGHTS TO READ!

"This stuff's irreplaceable. Your master's thesis that you've been working on for six years that you, that you promised yourself you'll back up next week, we have saved more MBA degrees in this country than anybody," he adds.

You've been working on your master's thesis for six years? I think you have a bigger problem than your computer.

Stephens says the company has become indispensable. "Because I don't think that the pace of innovation is going to slow. I don't think people realize the Internet revolution hasn't even really started yet," he explains.

What does that have to do with installing Norton Antivirus on people's Windows boxes?

A dozen years ago, when Stephens started the Geek Squad, most people used IBM computers, and primitive Microsoft software

I think people stopped using IBM computers about 25 years ago, but at least Kroft got the "primitive Microsoft software" part right. In fact, it's still primitive!

Today, thousands of products and providers allow you to watch TV shows, make phone calls, download music print color photos, and dictate letters without leaving your desktop, if you have the time, the patience, the aptitude, and the available brain cells to master yet another software protocol.

Yeah, I've been partying so much on Saturday nights I lost all my brain cells. Explain to me again what a "software protocol" is again?

"Microsoft made the operating system, some company in Taiwan made the equipment, you’re running software from a company in California, and now you're installing the driver for a digital camera from a fourth company. You know, what are the odds that all of these are going to work flawlessly together for all 400 million people who have PCs? Zip," Pogue says.

This is so ludicrous I don't even know where to start. What does the fact that The World Is Flat have anything to do with hardware working correctly?

Then again, I've never installed a digital camera driver in my life. Even my Agfa Clik! camera worked just fine with Windows Imaging, which came with Windows 98.

"Honestly, where do you go if you can’t get it work. People buy this stuff and then [get] dropped. Where do they go for help?" Pogue asks.

I dunno, Google?

"How hard is it for an average person to go into a store and buy a high-def TV set and come back and work it," Kroft asks. "I would say, in my client base, it would probably be less than five percent," Austi says.

Austi clearly has a client base consisting entirely of aliens from the planet Stupid.

Robert Stephens, of the Geek Squad, says more than a third of the wireless routers and modems purchased at Best Buy are returned because people think they are just too complicated.

That is a boldfaced lie.

New York school teacher David Barkhymer, who considers himself a bit of geek, fell into the last category: he spent three days trying to hook up his new 32 inch HDTV, plodding through menus and a manual that was almost certainly written by Korean engineers.

Beyond the obvious slight to Koreans, has Mr. Barkhymer considered simply hooking up his TV using the handy color-coded cables? They've only been standardized since, oh, forever. Green goes to green. Blue goes to blue. Red goes to red.

Perhaps he's color-blind. Or from the planet Stupid.

Dr. Donald Norman is an uber-geek – a professor at Northwestern University and one of the preeminent engineers in the country. He helped set the technical standards for high definition television in the U.S., but he had to hire a geek to set up his own TV.

Maybe he was just too BUSY.

"Absolutely not. No, it's not their fault. It's the damned designers of this stuff who have no understanding of real people, everyday people," Norman says.

YOU DESIGNED IT, IDIOT!

"Someone complained to me, ‘You'd need a degree, an engineering degree from MIT, to work this damn thing,’" Norman says. "Well, I have an engineering degree from MIT. And I couldn't work it."

That giant sucking sound you just heard was thousands of potential MIT applicants downloading applications to Stanford.

Norman says one of the problems is function creep, adding all sorts of features that people don’t want, don’t need, can’t use, and don’t even know they have. For every new feature, there has to be a new button. And they keep getting smaller and smaller, and harder to read.

Perhaps we didn't need HDTV after all.

You might get used to it if you only had one remote, but a collection is the standard. Pogue says, "This is I suspect the situation most people have on their coffee tables."

You can buy a universal remote now for a few hundred dollars, but you don’t even want to know how complicated it is to set up. Almost everything has a computer chip in it now, including toasters.

A FEW HUNDRED DOLLARS?

A FEW HUNDRED DOLLARS???

That or $2.99 from Overstock.com or hundreds of other dealers.

Then there’s iPod’s, cell phones and digital cameras, even dishwashers and refrigerators that need to be programmed.

I have never had to "program" any of those objects.

"Why do I need a computer in my refrigerator?" Kroft asks.

"Well, you don't. But you bought one that does have a chip, so you're on the cutting-edge. Just be glad that you didn't get the one that requires an Internet connection. There are three of those now," Pogue says.

What do they do?

"It's absolutely amazing. When you run out of something, it knows, and it creates a list for you. A shopping list. So you can even hook it up to, let's say, one of the online grocery store delivery systems, and you're in business," Pogue says.

It's AMAZING! Be glad you don't have one.

It’s enough to make you want get in your car and drive as far away as you can get from all this advancing technology, providing you’re not doing it in a Mercedes, Audi or BMW: all have elaborate onboard computer systems, that may require you to navigate a number of different menus just to turn up the temperature or to tune the radio, not something that is recommended while you are driving along at 65 miles an hour.

If you can afford an expensive car, I'm assuming you made your money being intelligent enough to drive it.

"Well, if you're buying a 50 or $60,000, or more, car, you don't want pedestrian-looking buttons. You want something sophisticated, and something that the average car thief maybe can't figure out,” Ray adds. “If have a seven-series BMW, you just can't hand someone the keys and say, ‘Oh, take my car.’ Well, they're not going anywhere with it. ‘Take my car. But, oh, you have to come to the tutorial first.’"

Looks complicated.

Right now, there is plenty of job security – every two months something new comes out and their whole job changes. You could call it the revenge of the geeks.

"The geeks are ruling the universe," Kroft remarks.

Maybe their first job as emperors of the universe could be to teach people to, i dunno, read?

For what it's worth, 60minutes.yahoo.com has all kinds of video related to this story, but I'm not going to bother linking to them, since they only work on Windows, and I think that's irony at its greatest: if we weren't living in a Windows world, this entire story would never have been made.