ahream

If someone finds me wandering the streets yelling, “Control Alt Delete! Control Alt Delete! No extra space between paragraphs! No extra space!” Please just point me gently in the direction of my home. I’ll make it back eventually.

After many, many years of happily tooling along in my word processing program of choice, WordPerfect, I was forced kicking and screaming into Microsoft’s clutches. Agents, editors, everybody wants you to send them everything as a “.doc” file, and as we all know, “.doc” stands for Destroyer Of Civilization (as you know it) i.e. Microsoft Word.

“Fine. Okay. You win. I’ll buy it. Jeez-Louise, what’s the big deal?” I thought. Okay, first the big deal is the price tag. I had a little stroke in the Best Buy when I had to pay for my handy-dandy little Office Suite. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Office Suite. It’s a homonym. Just a sugary little bit of goodness – for 400 freaking dollars!

Okay, so I go home a wee bit bitter about my “suite/sweet.” Then I install it and attempt to actually create a text file. Okay, look. I am a simple woman with simple needs. Times New Roman 12 pt. double spaced, one inch margins. That’s what I want. That’s all I want. Getting it is like trying to order a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at Le Cirque.

“Madam, would you not prefer the extra space between your paragraphs?”

“No. Just the plain ol’ PB&J double spaced. Thanks.”

“Would you not like us to correct your grammar, your spelling, rearrange all the words in your document so they are in iambic pentameter?”

“NO! Leave it alone. Do nothing!”

“Madam, we at Microsoft Word cannot do nothing! We must arbitrarily change your punctuation, your capitalization! We must make it physically impossible for a person of normal intelligence to achieve a simple em dash without an instruction manual, six fingers on each hand and a personal note from God. While you wait, would you care for the Peking Duck with apricot sauce and a side of absolutely unintelligible user interface?”

At first, I just got frustrated. Then I tried to use the “help” feature – an ironically named item if ever there was one. And I got angry. Fourteen hours later, I was curled up in the fetal position, rocking gently and obsessively grooming my toe hair.

I am, at best, two weeks away from a shack in the woods with no running water, a manual typewriter and a 3,000-page manifesto, which I will double-space with no extra room between the paragraphs, so help me God!

I’m okay, you’re okay, I’m okay, you’re okay…

ahream Dispatches from the City of Angels I'm a mystery writer living in and writing about Los Angeles. You can catch my short story, "Running Venice," in the new anthology LAndmarked for Murder. Look for it in bookstores and on Amazon.com now. In the meantime, feel free to poke around. Over at my website you can find even more blog entries than I could fit here, as well as a few other ramblings. Enjoy and come back often.
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