Computers hate me. They are hard-wired to hate me. When Steve Jobs first built the Apple Macintosh computer, he installed a programme to shut down all systems when I so much as brush past a Qwerty keyboard. Bill Gates hates me too. PC stands for ‘Past Caring’ as far as I’m concerned.
Pretty much every day I call IT. We have such a tight relationship now that we have exchanged vows and rings. I have honed this relationship over the years and it’s all because of numerous breakdowns prompted by an innocuous action like typing my own name on a Word document. And I still haven’t worked out what ‘failover’ means. Is that an Australian who’s taken a tumble?
At home I have no broadband, and there’s a good reason. If I had, it would burn my house down. I have considered purchasing a dongle, but that sounds too much like a penis-based joke. I could never admit to having a two-inch dongle.
But in spite of all this computer-based woe that regularly blights my life there is still nothing worse in the technology world, in my experience, than the so-called ‘insert’ button.
Who invented this? Someone needs to hunt them down and place them on a restraining order that means they can never go near a personal computer again.
The ‘insert’ button has never been useful. It’s a completely rogue piece of technology and if you have taken the trouble to learn how to touch-type you’ll know the demon possession of this tantalisingly awkward function. And what’s ruddy point of it? I bet that if you carried out a poll in your organisation, you’ll get a 100% glaze-over response when asked about the validity of the ‘insert’ button. Not even the computer geeks know.
So you can forget the villainy of ‘Control C’ and ‘V’ , the insert button’s come to town and it wants to delete all your finely crafted words. You can be typing away, you’ll look away at the TV to see whether the Deal or No Dealer’s gone for broke and all the while, the cheeky little insert button has decided to have some fun with you.
Within a nanosecond you will have deleted 1,500 words. You’ll scrabble around trying to retrieve your prose from the depths of your laptop, knowing full well the text is now locked in the computer’s vault and unable to fashion an escape.
Arguably, the only thing more useless than the insert button on a standard PC keyboard is the ‘num lk’ button though. If you are not familiar with this nasty little shortcut, you’ll recoil in horror when you notice that half your keyboard has started to replace letters with numbers. Then you’ll be convinced there’s been a glitch and you’ll have to replace your laptop. You’ll trade it in, spend near on a grand for shiny new one and the second-hand laptop dealer who acquired your kit will have made a killing knowing full well that he’ll need no more than a prod on the ‘num lk’ button to sell your perfectly decent piece of technology on for an over-inflated price.
I bloody hate computers. The world should have stuck fast at the abacus and started reining the techno bods in when they dreamed up the slide rule. At that point Pandora’s box was, forgive me, well and truly open. Now society is full of ‘insert’ and ‘num lk’ victims rocking uncontrollably in mental institutions and they have my sympathy, because I know, and so do you, that they’ll never find their happy place ever again.
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