Computers gave us... a life full of waits and pauses.

Roberta Walton, the narrator of the book, starts the novel telling us how she is waiting for an immigration agent to pass her passport through the scanner:

And so we waited. Tick-tock, blink-blink, thirty seconds stretched themselves out one by one, a hole in human experience. Waiting for the system: life today is full of such pauses. The soft clacking of computer keys, then the voice on the telephone telling you, "Just a moment, please." The credit-card reader instructing you "Remove card quickly!" then displaying "Processing. Please, wait." The little hourglass icon on your computer screen reminding you how time is passing and there is nothing you can do about it. The diddler at the bottom of the browser screen going back and forth, back and forth like a caged crazed animal. All the hours the computer is supposedly saving us —I don't believe it, in the sum of things, I thought as I stood there leaning on my lugagge cart. It has filled our lives with little wait states like this one, useless wait states, little slices of time in which you can't do anything at all but stand there, sit there, hold the phone -the sort of unoccupied little slices of time no decent computer operating system would tolerate for itself. A computer, waiting like this, would find something usefult to do: check for other processes wanting attention, flush a file buffer, refresh a cache, at least.

(Ullman: pp. 4-5)

Sure, it's unfair to depict computers in this manner. For the most part they do indeed save us plenty of time —what if that very same immigration agent had to manually verify her identity, for starters? Still, I think it was an interesting —in the sense of different, unusual— thought. We are perhaps too used to complimenting the use of new technology in the modern world to realize this sort of small, almost imperceptible waits.