Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - It's getting really weird in TechWorld

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Brooks Peterson

Monday, November 5, 2001
It's getting really weird in TechWorld

With your kind indulgence, I propose to indulge in a brief retreat from Significance. There are all manner of cosmic issues whizzing around in the ether, but even as we acknowledge that, we must remind ourselves that irrelevance, too, has its place.
   Why do I find myself in this anti-social and un-grown-up, mindset?
   Computers.
   (Oh, no, you say: Is he about to launch into another one of those neo-Luddite anti-technology rants? Yes.)
   Now, over time I have come to a kind of armed truce with computers - the one on which I toil here in particular. Computers have their place in the great scheme of things, blah, blah, blah. I don't much like the computer, and I know of a moral certainty that the computer isn't crazy about me. We just . . . cope.
   Until last week, that is. Now, there is surely some kind of reasonable explanation for my computer woes of Wednesday and Thursday - but me, I know. Computer gods angry. Bad juju.
   There I was on Wednesday, trying manfully to turn out an agenda. In the absence of the vacationing Editorial Page Editor, it was just one of my Things to Do. But . . . when I try to get a printout, what did I get? I'll tell you what I didn't get. I didn't get tidy little agendas on letter-size bond paper. Instead, I got printouts first on legal-size paper; and then, when I persisted in my folly, I got printouts on the huge 11-by-17 stock we use for our page proofs. (That wasn't entirely bad, I guess: Sort of analogous to the thrill that archy, the poet whose soul had transmigrated into the body of a cockroach, got when the typewriter on which he toiled nightly had been set to produce upper-case letters.)
   The missing tool bar mystery
   As it turned out, though, this was but a warm-up for Thursday: I signed on, summoned up a letter to the editor for editing and processing, only to be flummoxed by . . . a great vacancy. What's missing from this picture?
   I'll tell you what: tool bars.
   In a happier, more ignorant time, I might have assumed tool bars were taverns where home-improvement types hang out, but no: In TechWorld, tool bars are the little boxes at the top of the screen that make it possible for you to edit, move, massage and otherwise tweak the written word. They bear such cryptic labels as File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, and the baffling CloseNoSave (a metaphor for post-20th-century angst?).
   And if you got no tool bars, ain't nothin' gonna happen to that letter to the editor, or editorial, or column, or correction shimmering there on the screen before you.
   Experiences such as this inspire in me a sensation of existential futility so profound as to border on - what's the technical term? - oh, yeah: the screaming meemies.
   Of course, our computer gurus ultimately resolved the situation; and as usual, they were gentle, supportive and patient . . . and, perhaps, just the least little bit pitying? (But they can't fool me: I see them wince when I come down the hall.)
   Happily, there is in this bewildering intellectual and emotional landscape one lodestone of sanity, one beacon of comprehensibility: a kind of analog, if you will to the portal in the "Stargate" TV series that conveys you from one dimension to another.
   It is the vintage-1915 (give or take) Royal typewriter that occupies a place of honor and veneration amid the rubble atop my desk. It is big. It is substantial. It is shiny black, even after all these years. It still has those beveled-glass windows on its flanks (nothing to hide!).
   It is my granddad's typewriter, a link to his world. It is solid. It requires only perfunctory maintenance: Change the ribbon now and then; clean it up occasionally.
   You want to commit a thought to paper? You slip a sheet into the typewriter, crank it in, and hammer away at them keys. (By the way: Ever hear of anybody contracting carpal tunnel syndrome from a 1915 Royal manual? I think not.) And it never crashes.
   Scoff if you will, but when the system goes down for the count, I'm ready.

   Brooks Peterson can be reached at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com.


Brooks Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com

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