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Long before Murphy passed his Law, troops in World War II discovered the Gremlins—those mischievous little creatures who sneaked in and made normally working things go wrong. You drop something on the floor and it sill roll until
it finds the hardest to reach resting place, under a sofa, behind a
refrigerator. You place an
important document on your desk and it hides under all the other junk you have
there. That’s the Gremlins at
work. Looking I back, I recall with yearning the comfortable
days of writing on an old Underwood non-electric typewriter.
Sure, it took fingers with stamina to beat on the keys to make the little
mechanical arms swing in the arc to hit a ribbon and leave a letter on a piece
of paper. You learned not to make
mistakes and to spell correctly. No
unseen helper would automatically teach you to spell or raise a question if you
split an infinitive. If you made a mistake, you had to correct it, or start
over until you got it right. Many,
many times I would start a column or a story, not like the lead and toss the
copy paper in the waste basket. When
I had the lead the way I wanted it, I banged out the story and then took a
comfortable soft lead pencil to make my corrections before sending it back to
the composing room. But you could see what you were doing and when you were
finished. You could see how long
the story ran on a piece of paper. I
figured one sheet of double spaced copy would set six inches in the newspaper
with one column, eight-point type. There were gremlins.
You got used to them. If a
character on the typewriter became lazy, you just hit a bit harder until—and
if—you decided to have the old faithful machine repaired. Then someone came along with computers.
You brush your fingers across a keyboard and the characters appear on a
TV like screen. If you don’t like
what you do, you back space and it’s erased.
If you have a paragraph where you think it would fit better somewhere
else, you can highlight and move it. Seems
like black magic sometime. But those old Gremlins wont go away.
You spend hours getting an article just like you want it and
-- the power goes off, you hit the delete key by mistake or you just
forget to save it into that ethereal world hidden somewhere in the computer. An hour’s, a day’s or a month’s work is gone. Gremlins love computers. If there’s any way the can mess up, they will.
Sure, computers only perform according to the information a person puts
in. Somehow, though, the computer
thrives on human mistakes. My two-year old Compaq computer was limping along and
then had indigestion. It wouldn’t
digest any information. Buying a
new one, I began the laborious task of transferring information.
After a couple of months, I had most of the data where I could find it,
except my email list was on the old computer. About the same time, I decided to try BellSouth’s deal
of internet and a phone line. A
friend had experience hooking up the system and offered to help. And he thought he knew a way to transfer the mailing list. The gremlins took over.
When he tried to load the mailing list in a different file, the gremlins
threw everything haywire. They
jumbled the information up so much I couldn’t find anything. What to do? I
began using disks to copy tons of work and storing it back on my old computer
for safety. Then I took the restore
disk and erased everything on the new machine, back to the day it came from the
factory. Now all I have to do is
use the floppy disks like wheelbarrows to carry it back from the ancient
contraption of only two years life to the new one. I call my friend Dalton Roberts the millennium man
because he loves this new century with all the excitement it offers. Someone else can have the excitement.
Give me back my Underwood. At
least, if I do something wrong, I can dig the crumpled sheet out of the
wastebasket. Or I can if it
hasn’t gone to the Recycle Bin.
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