Do machines have feelings? If to have a personality means to have feelings, then yes. Simple syllogism, simple answer.

All right, I don’t believe that machines actually experience emotions. They don’t feel happy, angry, joyous, etc. (though I’m not prepared to say they are not capable of being spiteful or thoroughly bloodyminded). But I do believe that machines acquire over a period of time their own personal pattern of behaviour. For instance, we have an answering machine at home whose personality can be only described as slow and steady. It has loyally recorded messages for the last six years: without complaint, without asking for a raise in pay, or extra perks… it just chugs along.

This is not the case with my friend Claudia’s machine. Though it’s the same model as mine, her machine definitely has an ego problem. There are times when Claudia is home, and her answering machine, like some discontented butler, jumps in to record a message instantly and doesn’t even let the phone ring. Claudia sits in her living room oblivious of the swarm of friends trying desperately to contact her, just because Mr. Indispensable is in a huff. Or it tells callers it will record their messages after the beep, and doesn’t. There are even times it goes into a sulk and completely disassociates itself from the responsibilities of its job.

I’ve told Claudia numerous times to fire the idiotic thing, but she is rather defensive about the machine’s shortcomings. She’s accustomed to its quirks and all too willing to turn a blind eye to certain inconsistencies in its work ethics.

My husband and teenage son resist all my theories about computer behaviour having anything to do with personality traits. If a problem arises with one of our computers or software programs, they refuse to accept my suggestion that pandering to the computer might help. Whereas I spend time getting acquainted with the computer, trying to figure out how it is behaving and why, they concentrate on researching and rectifying the system bugs, and, if they are not successful at doing this, ignoring the problem as far as possible. In their eyes, computers, operating systems, and software programs are all created equal: what works on one system has to work on another.

This of course is just not so, and I believe it has never been so. Throughout history machines have shown attributes of human behaviour. After all, human beings developed these machines so how could it be otherwise? This is why every boat sails in her own way and many cars drive well only with a certain type of driver. This is also why some computers perform tasks only if the necessary commands are given in a particular order, an order that must be discovered.

What is often hard for computer users to accept is that the commands and their order of occurrence can vary from machine to machine. Some people, my husband and son for example, believe such quirks are just universal technical bugs that follow logical rules and occur on all computers with the same hardware or software. When a problem pops up on my computer, however, I do not concern myself with whether this problem occurs on all the other computers. I just want to fix the present one, if possible, immediately.

While the fellows search for technical solutions online or in computer magazine articles, I expend my energy trying to discover the string of commands that my particular computer needs to complete its task. To do this I basically go through all the combinations and permutations of the commands until something works. My fellows ridicule my method as being shamefully unscientific. They are wrong, though - it might be somewhat random and intuitive, but it is still a perfectly logical procedure.

What they do not realise is that their vision is clouded by their objectivity. Believing that the nature of technology is universal or equalitarian makes it nearly impossible to find quick solutions for immediate individual problems. The fact is that my method of madness not only works more often than theirs does, but also usually comes up with the “solution” quicker than theirs do.

The irony of course is that computers, invented by men to be objective, consistent, predictable, and biddable, turn out to be irrational, inconsistent, unpredictable, and wilful. No wonder it takes a woman to figure them out.