Use It, Lose It by Dianna Boatman
photo by bingbing
Don’t you have a computer? I just can’t write without mine.
Oh yes, I have a computer (two at home and two at school as a matter of fact). But if you think I’m going to trust my early drafting to one of them think again! I would have difficulty trusting anything important to one of them. To begin with I don’t understand them. Megabits, operating systems, programs, hard-drives,, software (that is hard), and modems – you might as well be speaking Greek. I’m told a piece of equipment is universal but it doesn’t work with my machine! I ask the machine to perform a function,
“You have performed an illegal operation, if you continue you till be shut down.”
Does it give me any clue as to what I did that constituted an illegal operation? N-O-O-O-O!
Well, you need tech support.
Oh yeah, tech support, right. You mean the books or the guy on the phone that understands this creature so well that he can’t fathom that some of us “DON’T GET IT”. That same guy on the phone, he wrote the book. He leaves out everything between turn the machine on and go to this file, open it up, find x, y, and z and then type in blah-blah-blah. Yeah, he’s real supportive! Right up there with a worn-out girdle!
Well, you just need to play with it.
Uh-huh – the last two times I just “played” with the computer it had to be totally rebuilt. My husband is definitely no longer an advocate of my “playing around” with the computer.
Secondly I find them extremely undependable. They continually run out of memory, ink, or disk space. The modem fails to connect to the Internet the night before something is due and everyone has left the I-Net service office for the day. And relationships between computers and their printers resemble a bad marriage. One day they communicate with each other, the next – NO WAY. And you never know if it is a good day or a bad day. And finally there are those buttons , F1, F2, F3…, insert, delete, control, and alt and they do not do the same thing every time you hit one of them. What they do depends on the “program” you are in and there is no way to memorize all of that information. So it’s back to the book, but I’ve already told you – “The book doesn’t help.”
So, yes, I have computers, and I promise that I will word process my final copy but for the real work I’ll just continue to do it the old fashioned way with pen and paper. It’s almost foolproof. Now, where did that read notebook go – you know the one with my writing drafts in it?
