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A passion for pausing

I SPEND a lot of my time in a chair, and a lot of my time in chairs is spent facing computer screens. Like most people who spend an expressible percentage of their life heads-cocked at a pixel box, I've cultivated a fairly substantial list of things I hate about them.

That's boring, though, isn't it? Even if I dressed it up as a sideways look at browser crash reports, there's nothing worse than listening to a technically minded idiot who splashes on like he's at an open-mic night for nerds.

Instead, I want to talk about something I'm hopelessly in love with. There's a lot of ridiculous talk of love when technology comes up. The covers of gadget magazines are thick with dolly birds. These people, obviously, are fickle imbeciles — my love runs deeper than that. I am mad keen on progress bars, the little graphical indicators that make long waits for downloads and installing bearable, by reassuring you that although the end may be a few minutes away, by God, we're getting there.

In a world where waiting takes up so much of life, progress bars shatter one tedious wait into a hundred thrilling ones. In my lifetime of enjoyable underachievement, I'll grab that precious sense of progress wherever I can get it. And thanks to progress bars, I can get it everywhere.

It's not a blind love. The progress bar has to behave in a decent fashion. A progress bar that sticks at 32 per cent for a minute before lurching up to 54 per cent isn't being completely honest with you. That said, a progress bar that pauses at 87 per cent before making a sly dash for completion can be instantly forgiven — perhaps even applauded for its sense of playful drama.

But what happens when you've got a long progress bar? Say, you're downloading a particularly drab and offensive episode of Torchwood. Even I balk at the idea of spending that long with a single progress bar for such scant reward.

The solution, you might suggest, would be to go into another room, and use my eyes for something other than staring. You would be upsettingly wrong — the kinky solution is more progress bars. One for overall progress, and another, more spirited one for the progress of individual events. Decompressing a cab file, are you? I bet you are. Come on, let's push the single beds together tonight.

It's not always an easy love, either. I lost a progress bar that was very dear to me in 2000. It was in a Windows utility called defrag. I won't bore and outrage you with a set of half-correct details, but basically defrag featured the longest progress bar you'll ever see. Your entire hard drive was laid out before you, and you got to watch the computer picking nits out of its files. You were presented with so much ridiculously unnecessary information that you felt like the computer was letting you in. It was like stumbling into the bedchamber of a cripplingly shy princess, and after she flinches slightly, she awkwardly allows you to watch as she combs her beautiful long hair. It was replaced in newer versions of Windows by a gaudy set of pixel stripes.

Once you admit your love for progress bars, you'll find them everywhere. An old-fashioned post office queue will do, if I'm away from my screen for any length of time. I had the pleasure of phoning the Oyster Card helpline this week. The 20-minute wait was transformed into a whimsical guessing game by the fact that a mechanical lady told me how many people were before me in the queue. And anyone who hasn't looked out of a car window, waiting for the next road sign to tell them how many miles are left to Ilfracombe ... well, you probably went on nicer holidays than I did. The only times you'll ever feel frustrated are when there isn't a progress bar to help you along ... and then? Just count to 5,000.

©Guardian News Service