A Douglas Adams insight

Douglas Adams' Hitch-hiker series ends with "Mostly Harmless", which gets mixed reviews; for me it's a triumph, far superior to the very light-weight volume 4 "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish".

It begins with a demented computer on board a huge spaceship, which one day wakes up to the fact that something isn't functioning properly, but doesn't have the wherewithal to put itself right.  "At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were aso missing."  It sends robots to replace the central mission module, only en route the component falls out of the ship and out into deep space.  Because "a meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship.  The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite."

Adams continues "The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole.  This turned out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that there was a hole and the supervisors which should have said that the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly and kept saying that the sensors were fine."

This of course will ring bells with anyone who has ever shouted himself hoarse at some damn fool of a computer which won't perform the task it has been set, while telling you all the time that it is performing it.  "Windows is printing your document".  Yeah, right.  But it also rings bells in a dementia context.  Sensors stop working but at the same time, the supervisors which should tell you that they're not working also stop working.  The patient talks rubbish but doesn't know it's rubbish.  Personal care starts to slip but who cares about personal care?

If you try to point out these things you may hit various reactions: incomprehension perhaps, or aggression of the kind you meet in paranod patients - how dare you suggest I'm paranoid?  You see, you're in the plot to keep me locked up on this ward as well when there's nothing the matter with me!  But there's a third response: meek, almost childlike, compliance.  OK, so the house is a tip.  You clean it up then - and mercifully that's how my Dad is at present.  He may, or more likely may not, realise that all is far from well, but if I want to put it right he won't stand in my way.  He's lost his instruction manual, which would tell him, for example, that you don't leave yoghurt pots on the lounge floor.  But he's also lost the backup command -  in event of losing instruction manual, draw someone else's attention to the problem and see if they can help.  He doesn't see, in the case of yoghurt pots on the lounge floor, that there is a problem.  There's a hole in his capacity through which has fallen the ability to understand that there's a hole in his capacity.  As so often, Adams provides illumination.