It was interesting to me reading the reactions to my adventures driving a manual transmission. People seemed to be spending a lot of time trying to convince me that if only I were to expend a bit more effort in learning the finer points of driving a manual transmission and log enough time behind the wheel, then the activity will become less taxing on my mental brainpower.

But why should I care?

To me, driving is not an end in itself. It is just a tool for solving the problem of getting from point A to point B. The less I have to learn about how to accomplish this task the better.

My goal is not to become a car expert. My goal is to get to my destination conveniently. I don’t want to “have greater control over the experience”; I don’t want “more power”; heck, depending on where I’m going, I often prefer to take the bus, where I have no control over the experience at all!

It occurred to me as I read commenter after commenter try to convince me that my own personal priorities were incorrect that I drive a car the same way most people use a computer. They don’t want to know about the difference between ROM and RAM or how many floppy disks you can store in a 6 megabit cable modem. They just want to surf the web, send email, and look at pictures of their grandchildren. (Okay, they may want to do other stuff too, but knowing the difference between PIO and DMA is definitely not on the list.)

There’s no point trying to get these people to learn all these details about how computers work because they don’t care. They just want to know where they need to click to see that picture of baby Annie. You can even tell them that the way they’re doing it is suboptimal and there’s a much more powerful way to view those pictures which also gives them the ability to alter the gamma curve and apply the correct color adjustment to the image to match their monitor’s color temperature, but they won’t care.

And I don’t blame them. Because I don’t care either.