Are computers causing us more problems then it's solving?

This morning, someone in our lab asked me to help him send some pictures to his daughter. I thought it's just attach and send, so I went ahead to show him. First, he needs to find the photos he wants to send. The photos are on the lab intranet server, so he went to download them. But then, his connection kept disconnecting and reconnecting to the server every 10~20 minutes. It took him like half an hour to find the ones he wanted and get them on to his desktop. Then, I have to help him find the attach button in his Outlook tool bar. I have used Netscape mail, Thunderbird and Outlook express, and am recently just using Yahoo and Google's webmail UI, in all those cases, the attach button/link is relatively easily spotted. (Except Outlook express, which my junior high computer teacher telled us where it is...) However, I've never seen such an interface nightmare as I've seen today. Outlook launch this "Word email editor" window when you compose a new mail, and on top of the window, there's 3 whole lines of button icons there, most of them, of course, are stuff you'd never use. I felt like finding a needle in a haystack, but eventually found the "paper clip" icon, which I vaguely remember from Outlook express that means attach file (I'd never know what a paper clip means if I never used Outlook express). So there goes Microsoft's trick at it's best, using unsuggestive icons, and burying often used functions deep in a pile of junk.

But the nightmare does not end there. I don't know the outgoing mail size limit of UCLA's mail server, but he just attached 3 photos, reaching a size of about 7MB, and maxed out the size limit: mail blocked. After a futile attempt of compressing the photos into a zip file (size still near 7MB), we decided to send then photos one by one. But then his mail box it self maxed out. Maybe he didn't have the habit of cleaning his mailbox...

Should this be that hard? He just wanted to share some moments of joy of his life with his daughter. And our computing environment made this simple wish extreemly hard to acomplish. In the end I just gave him a Gmail account, which has a simple but useful user interface, constantly growing mailbox size, and 10MB outgoing size limit.
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One other night, a friend at the Co-Op wanted to log on to MSN messenger to chat with another friend. But her ACER notebook, also, kept connecting and disconnecting from the WIFI connection. I told her never buy an Acer again, and just let her use my ultra stable MacBook.
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Yet another friend, who also has an Acer, one day found out that his notebook somehow deleted it's CD/DVD burning drive's driver files, automaticaly, all by it self. The driver couldn't be found on Acer's support site. And the driver from someone else's Acer of the same model somehow didn't work either. After 2 days of trying, he gave up and recovered to the original factory settings.
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Computing should never be that hard, but we do have a lot of idiots in the IT industry.

With my MacBook and Clie TH55, my rate of having something crash in my face is less then once a week. However, it takes a geek like me to know to choose MacOS and Palm OS. It also takes a geek to know to stay away from Microsoft and wisely use Google's great services. Hope more people would get the know how to avoid computer problems and get their work done, not wasting their time solving stupid problems.