Computer Creatures Work Less Well With Laptops

I was cleaning my bedroom today and it being fairly clean already I though I’d venture into clearing some of the junk off my bedside table. It isn’t a task that is required as part of the room cleaning process but it makes things look very slightly better so I did it.

The first objects of note that I found on my bedside table were some old train tickets from 2006. Most of them expired in May but one of them expired in April- the 21st to be precise. This led to a very interesting Twitter conversation, which if you are interested enough you will read through my history to find.

All the other train tickets are in the bin now, but the one that turns 3 next week is sitting on my main desk now, waiting for its birthday when I will then throw it out.
However that is not what I am wanting to talk about specifically.

Two other objects of note that I found while tidying the top of my bedside table were these small plastic animals: one a snake and the other a lizard. These plastic animals are the likes of things you get in party bags as a kid, in fact I’m sure that I got both of them that way.
But they were still with me and cluttering my bedside table until today because they are computer creatures.

Back in the debatably good but certainly old days where we all had computers that were big flat desktops (none of this tower nonsense) and monitors that were about the same size, computers were things to be decorated. So was born the computer creature. Instead of discarding small plastic objects once the party they were provided by was safely over, the creatures were mounted in places out of the way but still in sight on the computer. The best position was dead centre on top of the monitor at the front. This way it was obvious and kind of cute but not taking up valuable space.
Depending on how tidy you were and what type of desk you had, you may use the top of the computer itself to store computer creatures. I never did this though as I used it to store everything, generally making a mess that would resemble the top of my bedside table. (As an aside I suspect much of the mess on my bedside table was once on top of the computer.)

Computer creatures didn’t have to be animals of course, they could be anything. Also popular were little pipecleaner men or for the geekier, small model TARDISs or Star Wars figurines. It said something about who you were, it made the computer look better, it was fun.

You don’t see computer creatures around any more though, because their habitat has been taken from them. No longer do we have large desktops and deep monitors. If you have a “desktop” computer then it will almost certainly be a tower. Worse it could be a tiny thing, like a Dell Mini (probably not what it is actually called but you know what I mean- the tiny rounded box about the size of a shoe), a Mac Mini or even an iMac. Some people still may decorate these computer types with computer creatures, but it is difficult and unless done well will look silly, impractical or most likely both.
The worst people, and they are a growing group, are laptop uses. Having a laptop over a desktop has many advantages, it also has disadvantages, but it definitely eliminates the chance of computer creatures.

Flat screen monitors have done the greatest amount of damage. A standard monitor today is way too thin to host a computer creature.

Some people will still have them, some people never knew they existed. Some people call them by another name. Whoever you are, whatever you called them, next time you buy a computer, or next time you think your desk is too clean or too messy, give a thought to the computer creatures. They are the victims of office habitat destruction.



All this said I love my laptop and there is no way I’d give it up for the sake of a useless plastic toy. But the useless plastic toy still deserves some recognition.