In the grainy surveillance camera footage, the dumpy, mustachioed fellow looks like just one more office peon saddled with a balky computer—until he takes his revenge. He smacks the monitor, pummels it with his keyboard, shoves it off the desk and then heaves out of his chair and kicks it. Coworkers peer over the cubicle walls, fascinated.

It turns out that this office drama was staged by a security company to use as a promotional video. But it hit a nerve. It rocketed around the Internet a few years back and is now enshrined on dozens of Web sites from Italy to Japan.

Some technologies are merely disappointing when they fail—the cell phone drops a call, the toaster chars a bagel. The computer, by contrast, has the unique power of making us furious with rage.

An uncooperative PC violates our expectations, says psychologist and computer scientist Donald Norman, author of Emotional Design, a new book about our emotional entanglements with ordinary objects. "The computer promises so much, and it often delivers. It has become an inseparable part of our lives," he says. So when it freezes, crashes or erases important files, "it's in some sense betraying that trust."

Most people know full well that computers are likely to fail them, says Norman. Yet they trust the machines anyway. A survey of computer users conducted in 2002 shows that 85 percent of PC owners are "very concerned" about losing data, and 57 percent have lost a file they thought was secure and protected. Yet only a quarter back up their files routinely, and more than 7 in 10 use their computers to store essential information like phone numbers, photographs and personal documents. Norman's recent e-mail questionnaire asking people which products they most appreciate showed that the home computer is universally disliked: "Almost nothing about the PC is pleasurable," offered one person.

What's worse, even though the machine's design or manufacturing flaws were probably at fault, users tend to blame themselves for the problem. That's when frustration turns to fury, which can lead to technocidal violence. "It's a horrible kind of anger, because we're blaming ourselves for technology's failures," says Norman.

The obvious solution is to improve the technology, making it better and more efficient. But Norman, who champions more pleasurable and delightful design, points to another solution that Sony used in its Aibo robot dog toy: Make it adorable. The toy doesn't work very well, reports Norman, but somehow it doesn't matter. With its smoothed-off contours, soft colors and awkward body language, its failures come across as puppy-like mistakes—and who could get angry at that?