Saturday, February 03, 2007

I hate computers

More accurately, I hate when they hang for no apparent reason and then everything comes to a screeching, hourglass-screen halt.

It happens when you're trying very hard to finish something so you can put it on someone's desk, get it in the mail, post it online, send it in e-mail.

You know, don't you.

Three times this morning I tried to copy and paste one snippet of text from an e-mail (one of those html ones) into a Word doc. Three times I got the blank screen with the hourglass running. The first time I waited, got another cuppa, waited, tried to close everything else I had open, and finally ended up banging the keyboard with "Alt-Control-Delete" half a dozen times or so in sheer frustration. Fat lot of good THAT did.

The second time Tony came to my rescue (he'd been on the phone while I was swearing at the computer) and managed to get things calmed down (he unplugged it) and then back up. Hung again.

The third time took. But not until I'd pasted the text into another doc and from there into the one I was working on. GRRRR.

Computers are wonderful when they work. And yeahyeahyeah, I know it's operator error most of the time when they don't. But they're like cars: you need them to get from here to there, and when they work, they're great. When they don't, you can't do what you need to do, at least with any kind of expediency.

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