More snippets from the book collection:
In a carefully argued passage of his seminal work The Third Policeman, the Irish writer Flann O'Brien described a syndrome, to which he claimed country policemen were especially prone, whereby constant contact with one's bicycle over a long period could produce an unfortunate and irreversible molecular interpenetration between rider and steed leading, it was said, to an exchange of characteristic behaviour.
Thus the rider might be observed from time to time leaning against the nearest wall with arms akimbo in the handlebar position, as it were – and his bicycle, while not exactly being seen to move of it's own accord, might be found to have edged its way into a cosy niche inside the house, though everyone was quite sure its rider had left it outside the front door.
O'Brien advanced the belief that some riders might find themselves, if not alerted to the danger in time, more than one third bicycle by the age of 50. Applying this to the designer computer relationship we could envisage the former developing a tendency to converse in a series of clicks and bleeps, and the latter displaying all-too-human fits of the sulks whenever the designer leaves the console to attend a call of nature or make a cup of tea, having to be coaxed back into decent machine behaviour.
From a paper given at the Pira/RSA Conference on Design/Technology/Communication, London 1990 reprinted in 'A word in your eye', Reading University 1996. Ken Garland.
