Life isn’t any simpler with computers – if anything it is more complicated and definitely more stressful.
About a month ago I spilled the last sip of a root beer float onto my laptop.
I grabbed a Kleenex and tried to wipe it up, which did a fine job of making sure it got pushed down into the crevices and channels along the keyboard, shorting it out.
When I tried the computer the next morning some keys didn’t work at all and most of the others didn’t put up the right letter on the screen.
The deadline for the next issue was looming too.
No problem though – I just went to my PC at home and cranked out the news.
That worked well until Wednesday morning – everything had been written and submitted except the editorial and this column. Wednesday is the day we proofread everything to (try to) catch all the mistakes. For that I have to be in the office in Greenwood – so no more desktop PC for me to work with. I was going to have to write the last two pieces on my tablet.
I hadn’t ever tried to write anything longer than a short note on the tablet. The pop up keyboard that magically appears on the screen is only about half the normal size. So my big fingers were always hitting the wrong keys. The tablet also had a handy autocorrect feature. More aptly named an ‘autoguess’ feature. What finally made it onto the document was sometimes amusing but seldom close to what I had meant to say.
So I drove back home to the PC and filed the last two pieces from there.
Whenever my kid sister comes across something that costs a lot she’ll say, “It’s kind of spendy.” Well this was turning out to be a spendy day for me because I had to drive to Grand Forks so I could take the laptop in to a techie.
When I did get to the computer repair store Derrick, the technician who is smart enough to fix the machines that always outsmart me, says that the first thing we needed to do is make sure the root beer float hadn’t gotten down into the main circuitry. So he pulls out this regular desktop keyboard and plugs it into the USB in the side of the laptop.
I was lucky - the rest of the computer was okay. But for the past three days I could have been using this laptop computer with a plug-in keyboard - this computer that held all my notes. Instead I’d had to start from scratch and make it all up.
Over the next week, while the laptop was in the shop, I was in Boston. This time I was using the tablet (and I did get better at it too). It had a different operating system from both the PC and the laptop so there was (still is) a bit of a steep learning curve.
Back home finally, with the laptop back from the shop it was time to put another paper out. It was confusing though because I had some notes in the original laptop, others on the PC and still more on the tablet. So I didn’t know where to start.
They say that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle and I guess God thought my load looked kind of heavy.
Obviously I was trying to work with too many computers at once.
So my PC died.