Cha-Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes...
So, I’m trying Microsoft Word 2007. Most people probably don’t think twice about their word processor. But me? I’m both a writer and a lawyer. Suffice to say, I spend a significant amount of time in and around my word processor.
I’ve been processing words for quite a long time.
I remember when my father brought home a word processing program for our Apple II GS. My fingers hovered above this alien input device (called a keyboard) and I thought, “Writing this by hand would be way faster.” I also remember thinking, “That blinking white line is pissing me off.”
And piss me off it did. So much so that I switched to my father’s venerable type-writer. It was this bulky number that had its own aluminum suitcase. I believe it was a Royal Aristocrat (for you typewriter haters, that is a non-electric from the 1960’s… my dad bought it for college).
Dear God did I love that thing. “Risto”, as I called it, was the most viscerally satisfying writing instrument I’ve ever used. Keys had to be punched forcefully, and you could both see and feel the little metal hammer rising out of the depths of its metal guts and triumphantly strike the paper. It soared into the process of word creation like my own little, twisted, metal nerd valkryie. The rickety racket created by this ancient colossus was deeply satisfying, on a creative level. When your room was filled with that ugly song, you said to yourself, “That is the sound of progress!” (“Progress”… of course, meaning whatever the twisted mind of an over-stimulated ten year-old came up with.)
And when you were done with a page? There was this triumphant slide and then ding!
I wish that sound followed me whenever I accomplished anything.
“Here is your coffee, sir.”
Ding!
“We, the jury, find as follows: the Defendant is not guilty.”
Ding!
“Tom Jones is finally playing the little snack bar outside the Court House… much to the bafflement of everyone in the human race.”
Ding!
As Microsoft started barfing out its various “office packages” (stifle your inner teenager), I was forced to bow to its ways. Slowly and grudgingly, I became skillful at using this program and the infernal keyboard it required. Programs like ICQ and powerful life influences like girls upped my words-per-minute until I was a fairly respectable typist.
(I’d learned my arrow keys years earlier, thanks to “Oregon Trail”. So you know, there are no bears left in Oregon; I killed them, ate them, and died atop an enormous pile of ammunition and dead bear. What your mother told you is true-bullets can’t cure dysentery.)
Life progressed. I became educated, and then became much better educated. I acquired ideals, then a juris doctorate. Then, naturally, I became poor and worked for the government.
It was there, while working for the government, that I discovered the pure magic of Open Office. If you don’t know what it is, Open Office is an entirely free program from Sun Microsystems that apes the “powerhouses” of the Microsoft Office Suite.
For the most part, it works fairly well. It processes words, points with power, and… whatever the hell those cells do in Excel. I hear tell on the street that it’s called “math”. I spent a few years somewhat happy with this state of affairs.
And then, days ago, I drafted an appellate brief. I won’t bore you with the legal analysis, but there were two fairly complex search and seizure issues to analyze, plus a totally novel issue of statutory interpretation. I handled this part of the brief without any problem. After spending about ten hours reviewing treatises and the relevant case law, I had the answers I needed and started drafting. Everything got written up. All foots (feet?) got noted.
Only one thing stood between me and (relative) sweet, sweet freedom: page numbers. With no small amount of shame, I tell you that I spend a G.D. hour of my life trying to get the pagination I wanted. Though it unmans me to say it, I even went to the little “Help” tab. (Though I staunchly and proudly maintain that I never did anything with that stupid little Microsoft “Help” paperclip, other than cast aspersions on its parentage and once, in a drunken haze, attempt to “slap” it… I have that much dignity left.) To make an hour-long story short, I could not get the pagination I wanted.
I found that state of affairs to be the stupidest state of affairs in the history of both states and affairs.
And lo, that was how I came to try Microsoft Word 2007.