Wordplay

No matter how long I’m involved with computers, I’ll never get accustomed to the inordinate length of time it takes to do anything.

I understand that it takes eons to install software, download stuff from the internet, do wonderfully creative stuff with photos etc – but how long does it take to write a letter? Not something the length of the Gettysburg address, just a simple little ditty to say hello to your old Uncle Albert. Should that simple task take so long you hair could go gray and fall out before you get to the ‘Yours Faithfully’?

In days of yore, you’d take a pen, a pad and start to write. You wouldn’t need the editing benefits of a word processor because your mind wouldn’t have become so lazy from constant exposure to commercial-laden television that it couldn’t think more than a word or two ahead.

So you write it. It takes half an hour and a cup of coffee. You address an envelope, put the two together and it’s done. There’s room for error, but not a lot. You could suffer an unexpected bout of cramp, the pen could run out of ink or perhaps you don’t have enough paper but, other than that, not a lot could happen to prevent the writing. Disasters that I could think of at this moment stretch the imagination and fall into a ‘when-the-aliens-come’ category; somewhat unreal.

Now, imagine what might go wrong if you use a computer with, say, Word…

You start to type – and let’s concede that you can do that relatively fast. You make typing and grammatical errors, thoughtfully highlighted by Word with squiggly red and green underlines, which you take the time to correct. This tends to distract and slow the process rather that help and it takes a while before more than a couple of paragraphs are on the screen. That’s if Word doesn’t throw a fit because you accidentally pressed a particular key combination that tells it to do something to your document.

Should that happen, you will have no knowledge of what occurred or how to prevent it happening again. If Word had been created to express its demonic intentions with an information message along the lines of ‘I’ve just detected that you wanted to remove all alignment, center random lines of text and put every third word in italics – and by the way, this service is called FUCKADOODLE’, then you’d at least be able to click some drop-down menu to disable fuckadoodle should you accidentally press that key combination again. But there’s not. So you breathe frustration and click the little ‘cancel’ arrow to make everything the way it was before – and pray that it stays that way.

Then there’s saving it. Should be easy and actually it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do it but, for some reason, people tend to find it a chore and screw it up. Uncle Albert’s letter ends up in a hitherto unknown location on the hard drive, where it will never be seen again. Conversely, saving a paper document is more of a passive process and involves NOT doing something – like NOT throwing it away, NOT burning it or NOT chewing it up and flushing it down the toilet.

What about other computer-related problems? Power outage, battery failure, machine freezing or even printing deficiencies get sent regularly by some evil deity to make your computing life hell and let’s not forget that curiosity, thankfully rare now where the PC entirely forgets it has a printer attached.

My printer has 6 ink cartridges, only one of which is black but if any other cartridge is empty, it won’t print anything – not even a letter to Albert, even if it has not the slightest hint of non-black text.

Why? Forgive me if I see no correlation between a lack of Light Magenta and the need to print a monochrome black letter. Is it me? Does this have any sense at all? Have I missed the painfully obvious?

So Uncle Albert will have to wait until I find myself in a shop that sells Epson 79 Light Magenta ink cartridges.

In a previous life, all I’d have to do would be borrow another pen.

I’m so sorry, Uncle Albert.