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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 will 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 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. I would like to give someone else the excitement. I would like to say, give me back my Underwood. At least, if I did something wrong, I can dig the crumpled sheet out of the wastebasket. Now I have to look in the Recycle Bin and hope it's still there. As if the gremlins were not formidable enough, they have been given an ally by AOL, Compaq, Hewlett Packard all the other greedy companies relying on technical help over the telephone. They have enlisted a staff in India and the Philippines. Anything the gremlins can't screw up in your computer, the non-English speaking voice on the phone will destroy with the advice. But--computers won't go away and we have to try to make a truce with the gremlins. They are here to stay.
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