People Have More Bugs Than Code
Why the Human Operating System Is Always in Beta
HumanOS Rift Valley v1.0
Every so often, usually after a long week or an even longer meeting, I’m reminded that humans are not the sleek, optimized, Wi-Fi-enabled beings we pretend to be. We’re not even a 1960s-era mainframe. In the realm of things that are truly useful and dependable, we fall somewhere between a gas‑station phone charger and one‑ply toilet paper.
And yet, we expect everyone around us to run flawlessly — while of course giving ourselves the requisite justification in recognition of a bad night’s sleep, inadequate caffeine levels, or just being overburdened by the annoying and endlessly incompetent people around us.
If our computers behaved the way people do, we’d have no problem spending eleven hours on a phone with customer support so long as there’s a good chance of a refund or a damned good thrashing of some idiot developer.
Or at least a patch — software or nicotine, whichever will calm you down quicker.
But when humans glitch, stall, or throw an error message in the middle of a conversation, we shrug our shoulders, roll our eyes and give them a pass, chalking it up to their inability to cope with life… or their spouse… or daylight. There’s a lot of leeway we can grant each other here.
This article is an attempt to catalogue some of our more common bugs.
Not to fix them, mind you — that would require a level of personal commitment that simply doesn’t exist. You see, while everyone can easily identify fault in everyone else (we're brilliant at this), they tend not to see those same faults in themselves. It's remarkable, really. We're all experts in other people's defects and complete amateurs when it comes to our own.
So nothing is going to change.
Ever.
It’s been 200,000 years since v1.0 of the human operating system shipped from its original launch site — with no updates.
But if we can at least acknowledge our glitches, then it becomes much easier to laugh at the absurdity of the human operating system.
Bug #1: The Spinning Wheel of Social Loading
Computers freeze when they’re overwhelmed — like your Mom’s iPad when she has thirty apps running, a couple of dozen emails from Christmas 2015 opened, and 700 tabs active in Safari. Humans freeze when someone asks, “So, how have you been?”
It’s the same phenomenon: too many processes running, not enough RAM.
It’s just bad memory management, really.
All of which leads to a slow‑motion system crash you can watch unfold in real time.
The eyes drift and eventually glaze over. The mouth opens slightly — maybe a little drool happens.
Then comes the freeze.
They look ever so slightly catatonic while they rearrange chunks of their memory like Tetris pieces. All they need is one contiguous block of free space big enough to form a coherent, engaged response.
And then the panic sets in.
They realize this is taking far too long for such a simple question, abort the operation entirely, and grab the first sliver of available brain space that’s just big enough to mumble something like, “Oh, you know… busy.”
This actually isn’t a bug — it’s a feature. If we actually answered honestly, the conversation would take three hours and end with both of us collapsing from mental exhaustion.
Bug #2: Memory Leaks (Especially on Mondays)
Another flavour of bad memory management is the memory leak. That’s when software forgets to release memory after it’s done with it, so it just keeps requesting (and hoarding) more and more memory until there’s nothing left and everything finally grinds to a halt.
Humans do this too. We call it “Monday.”
By 10 a.m., you’ve already forgotten the name of the new admin assistant, your lunch, and the reason you walked into the office supply room. Meanwhile, your brain is using 87% of its available capacity to remember your new password, which you’ve already changed three times that morning.
If we were code, someone would have rewritten us by now. If we were a horse… well, I’d rather not think about it.
Bug #3: The Infinite Loop of Overthinking
Computers get stuck in loops when a condition never resolves — it’s like doing something repeatedly until 2+2=5.
Which doesn’t happen often, but can if the values for 2 are large enough. And yes, I own this T-shirt.
Humans get stuck in loops when someone says, “Can we talk later?”
The loop begins immediately:
What did I do?
What didn’t I do?
Should I have done something?
Do I need to buy milk on the way home? …Wait.
Why did they say it like that?
Why didn’t they say more?
Why didn’t they say less?
This loop can run for hours, sometimes days, until the conversation finally takes place and turns out to be about something benign, like a scheduling change or requesting a ride to the airport.
Computers get stuck in infinite loops because the exit condition never objectively resolves. We get stuck because we think it hasn’t resolved — and we won’t exit the loop until the conversation finally gives us enough clarity to stop spiralling.
We’re not efficient machines programmed with anything that even resembles objective decision‑making. We’re a slipshod tin box of neuroses running self‑generating anxiety commands.
Bug #4: Patch Notes Nobody Reads
Our operating system may have remained untouched for a couple hundred millennia, but that doesn’t stop us from trying to apply the occasional software update to make things run better.
We call it “personal growth,” but it’s really just a patch update.
Some of these changes manifest organically — something that happens to you and you say to yourself “Wow… not gonna do that again.” Like sprinting barefoot across a wet pool deck or frying bacon without a shirt on.
Then there’s New Years’ resolutions, the vaporware of self-improvement. These are the upgrades that will be so transformative that we intentionally wait for the most symbolic day of the year to begin their installation. But they’re also the hardest goals to achieve — so we tend to give up on them quickly, if we even try. The New Years’ resolution is the good intention that eventually becomes one of the bricks we use to pave our own personal road to hell.
Eventually, we wind up with a library of patch notes — the things we’ve fixed, and the things we’ve simply decided to live with (and that everyone else around us must live with as well):
Fixed: tendency to say yes to everything
Fixed: belief that “I’ll do that tomorrow” is a valid task management strategy
Fixed: thinking one more episode won’t ruin tomorrow
Known Issue: still cannot avoid potato chips
Known Issue: still forgets why they walked into a room
Known Issue: still looks into a fridge full of food and orders pizza
These patch notes don’t exist anywhere except in our heads, which is probably why nobody reads them. The real trouble comes when we assume people are running the same version we remember from years ago. Then we’re surprised when they behave differently.
This isn’t a bug so much as it is poor documentation. And in case anyone asks, all known issues have since been reclassified as “features”.
Bug #5: The Compatibility Problem
Some software simply doesn’t play well with others. Humans are no different.
You can have two perfectly functional, reasonably intelligent people who, when placed in the same meeting, produce the interpersonal equivalent of one of those painfully slow progress bars.
Estimated time until mutual understanding achieved.
Nothing crashes outright, but nothing really works together nicely either. Every sentence one person says is met with a puzzled stare and a variant of, “That made absolutely no sense” from the other.
It’s not that either person is broken. It’s that some people were never meant to work on a project together.
One shows up with a briefcase, the other with a knapsack.
One waits for a lull in the conversation to share a thought, the other interjects immediately to nip a bad idea in the bud.
One wants to “circle back,” the other wants to “put a pin in it,” and neither knows what the other is talking about.
Hardware compatibility has never been a guarantee. Human compatibility even less so.
Bug #6: The Error Message That Says Nothing
Computers sometimes display errors that are technically accurate but completely useless:
“An unknown error has occurred.”
Now take a moment to appreciate just how unhelpful that message truly is.
There’s no next step. No guidance. No clue what you’re supposed to do except stare at the screen and hope the problem resolves itself through sheer force of will.
Humans do this too — we just phrase it differently:
“I’m fine.”
I’ve gleaned more useful information from a discarded ketchup packet in a McDonald’s parking lot.
And just like the unknown error, the “I’m fine” offers no actionable detail — and the sense that if you press for more information, the whole system might crash.
Bug #7: The Unscheduled Shutdown
Every human has a moment — often around 3 p.m. — when the system simply powers down. No warning. No graceful exit. Just a sudden, overwhelming need to lie horizontally on the nearest available surface, including but not limited to: carpet, couch, pile of laundry, or emotionally supportive dog.
Maybe you’re slowly developing resistance to caffeine. Maybe you just ate an entire family-sized chicken pot pie for lunch and are now slipping into a food coma. I’m not judging.
But at some point you shift from being reasonably peppy to having the energy of a sloth on Xanax.
This isn’t laziness. This is thermal regulation.
Around mid‑afternoon, your core body temperature dips — part of your circadian rhythm — and your brain responds by releasing melatonin. In other words: biology hits the dimmer switch.
Unfortunately, nodding off at work — whether in a meeting, at your desk, or while your boss is explaining something “critical” — is frowned upon for reasons no one has ever adequately explained.
So while computers get a cooling fan, we’re expected to push through this evolutionary design flaw by forcing ourselves into a state of quasi‑alertness, resulting in a thousand‑yard stare and the inability to count our fingers and get the same number twice in a row.
If workplaces understood this, we’d all have cots, afghans, and a pillow that’s perpetually cool on both sides.
System Reboot
If there’s a lesson in all this — and there really shouldn’t be — it’s that we should treat each other with the same patience we extend to our devices. When your laptop freezes, you don’t assume it hates you. You don’t take it personally. You don’t question its loyalty or its moral character.
You sigh, you wait, you restart, and you move on.
I’m fond of telling people that whatever computer they’re dealing with — be it their laptop, their tablet, their TV, or their watch — 99% of problems can be fixed by turning it off, then turning it back on.
There’s a reason this “solution” has become a cliché — IT professionals really do say it all the time, and it really does work.
People deserve this same kind of reset — a moment to power down, purge the clutter from their brains, and start fresh.
The Irish have a proverb I really do love: A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything. Maybe it’s time we all started embracing that sentiment.
Because we’re all running on hardware that’s getting older by the day, with no chance of ever being replaced. And our CPU capacity maxed out sometime in our mid‑30s, at which point slow and steady brain atrophy began.
There are no upgrades coming. Not even a minor patch.
So the miracle isn’t that we manage to get from one day to the next — it’s that we function as well as we do. Which, if we’re honest, isn’t very good at all.
So if you ever feel like you’re glitching, crashing, or running low on memory, allow yourself the grace of an occasional reboot. Remember: you’re not broken. You’re just human.
And you come pre‑installed with the buggiest code ever written — and somehow you still run.
Like what you read? I write, rewrite, overthink, rewrite again, and eventually post these things in hopes they resonate. If something struck a chord, sparked an idea, or — most importantly — made you laugh, please drop a comment below. Sarcasm is welcome, cruelty is not. So be honest, and be nice. It’s possible to do both.
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