Comforting the afflicted

If you're looking for signs of how our relationship with technology is growing more complicated, consider this: experience manning a suicide prevention hotline comes in handy when taking customer service calls for a hard-drive recovery business.

Seriously. As The Washington Post puts it, DriveSavers reps have to do triage on customer calls: "The challenge is to recognize which of the five stages of grief -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance -- a given customer is in, and respond accordingly."

It's just one sign of how computer rage is "is transforming the nature of technology service, an industry long infamous for being impersonal":

Business is booming for companies with names like Rent-a-Geek, Geeks on Call and Geek Squad that make house calls to fix computers. Television technicians, once near extinction, are again driving to homes to adjust complicated settings on high-definition sets and hook them up to multi-component home-entertainment systems. Some of the world's largest computer makers train their support personnel as much about customers' delicate psyches as they do about technical matters.

"There's this frustration that you are really dependent on these things that you don't understand and that you have no idea how to fix," said Kent L. Norman, a researcher at the University of Maryland's Laboratory for Automation Psychology and Decision Processes. "We place so much trust in computers that it gets a little scary."