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Dec. 16, 2006 I envy those people who were fortunate enough to take college classes about using Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word, or who had friends or fellow employees guiding them along, giving careful instructions at every juncture. In my case, there was nobody. I didn’t get a single word of instruction from anybody. I went to an employment agency in Los Angeles one day a few years ago, and they seated me at a computer. I didn’t have the faintest idea of anything whatsoever. In utter confusion I did finally locate online a firm in central California that had a job ad posted. As I sat at the computer, though, I noticed the man next to me highlighted and deleted most of the URL in his address box and typed in a new dotcom. So I went to the public library and signed up for computer time. Then I began typing in URL’s from a directory in book-form and visiting websites. I got the hang of navigating the web in a few days, but I knew nothing about Microsoft Word for some time. I saw that the computers at the library had a link to Word, so one day, when I had been using Internet exclusively for a couple of months, I clicked on the link. In a few days, I was processing my novel, but I had never even heard of floppy disks. I would merely type and print. If I found an error, I would do patchwork with glue and scissors and then get copies at a copying machine. Then one day, I overhead someone say something like, “I always save to a disk before I print.” I deduced that I should do likewise, so I bought some disks. Great! This was wonderful! I could print, proofread and correct later. I went full steam ahead, which is 25 to 30 words a minute for me, and after some weeks I had 150 pages of my novel on disks. I don’t know how many times I lost pages merely because I didn’t know about the Undo feature and other, similar features. Perhaps I would hit a wrong key and change a page to italics or to a different font, and not knowing I could correct it with the Format dropdown, I’d delete the page and retype it. Little by little I managed to learn some of the tricks of the trade though. There are probably many I still don’t know. How many times did I walk away from a computer at the library, leaving a disk inside never to be recovered? I’d have to type 20 or 30 pages all over. The worst experience was when I lost 150 pages of text I had typed, because of viruses that attacked my disks. I spent a couple of weeks retyping the lost chapters, but could not figure out how to copy from disk to disk. I went through several manuals on Word. Not a syllable. I finally got the information from an online tutorial. Thereafter I was able to keep 2 or 3 copies of each disk. I didn’t know that I could copy my writings into Yahoo Mail either, until I overheard someone say, “I always e-mail myself a copy of everything.” From that clue, I was able to set up a Yahoo Mail account. Now I have 200 megabytes of my own writings in my Yahoo Mailbox, and I seldom use disks. There have been so many other inexplicable occurrences that I’m simply bewildered. For example, I had created on Microsoft Word in LA a special dictionary of around 20,000 words that I composed. This was in tabular form, and amounted to about 400 pages of full-page tables. The typical disk has a 1.44 megabyte capacity. I had 3 sets of about 15 disks each. Each disk had 1.0, 1.1 or 1.2 megabytes of actual content. I got to Paraguay and wanted to correct some of the tables. I loaded one into a computer and corrected one or two letters. If I tried using ‘Save’ or ‘Save As’, the computer would try to copy the corrected text as it had been an additional item, rather than a correction, and there wouldn’t be room for it on the disk. If I deleted the original first and then clicked on Save, the corrected version still would not fit. So I’d lose the contents entirely. I had also copied the tables into Yahoo Mail, but it changed the fonts of the text and the lines in the table, and when I return to Microsoft Word, I cannot change them back. I don’t know how many hundreds of needless hours I’ve spent handling this dictionary to get around all these irregularities and surprises. In another book, of 550 pages, I left all kinds of spaces in the text for filling in characters from a foreign language that cannot be processed on Microsoft Word. The spaces all collapsed when I e-mailed it to myself. Now I'm going to have to spend 200 hours or more putting the spaces back in. Now just recently, a new kink came up. I always used to copy from Yahoo to Word without a hitch. Suddenly one day I could no longer do this. I would see an hourglass and end up having to reboot. My dictionary, now at 700 pages, became inert. No more corrections or additions could be made. I was terribly upset for a week or two, but finally decided to open a Hotmail box and start mailing my 200 megabytes to Hotmail, because I could copy from Hotmail to Word. So this took all kinds of time. Now I find out that there IS a way to copy from Yahoo Mail to Word, but I would never have guessed it in a million years. I got the answer from someone on Yahoo Answers, so now I’m back in business. Instead of just Paste, as in the old days, you now use Special Paste and Unformatted Text, but you have to change the font and size back. My guess is that, in all, I’ve thrown away 3 or 4 months of work, either through my own ignorance or because of problems with the system. I)n addition to the things I’ve already mentioned, there are others: Internet goes down temporarily, or a faulty mouse makes me lose an article I was just about to send to U-K and now have to rewrite, or there’s a power failure in South America. One thing or another! Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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