This is a long, sad story, but for those of you who remember me stopping at a Target in Atlanta back in March to buy the cheapest Microsoft Office-compliant computer they had…I’m still using it. For those of you who don’t remember that happening, it happened, and I’ve been unable to escape it since. I’m stuck on the worst recently-produced computer money can buy. It’s bad.
One of the funniest things about this computer is that if I get going really fast on a sentence here in Microsoft Word, it crashes. Microsoft Word crashes on this computer if I type too fast. Which, on one hand, is a pain in the ass, but on the other kind of makes me feel good about myself. Hey Bill Gates, get a load of this guy. He’s typing too fast for Microsoft Word. Guess you didn’t code this guy into your little machine.
I’m not actually a super-typist. Or at least, I don’t think I am. It’s been a long time since I played the Mavis-Beacon games in sixth grade Computer class. Is there a hyphen in Mavis-Beacon? Or is it Mavis Beacon? Is Mavis a first name? It sounds like something someone in Macon would be named. Mavis from Macon, who went to Georgia College not UGA. Mavis is a real old lady name, right? They aren’t making new Mavises right now? I guess that’ll change in a few years, like how so many babies are named Judas Iscariot these days. Wish I could buy stock in the name “Mavis.” Maybe I can? Maybe I can corner the market on gift shop keychains with MAVIS spelled out on a toy New York license plate? I miss New York. It’s been a while.
I did crush it at Mavis Beacon in sixth grade. Breezed through that shit, with the one exception being the ten-key side of the keyboard, which I never used growing up but became really useful when I briefly held that big boy job in the cubicle world where they had warm cookies available at 2 PM every Wednesday and my friends and I would reserve meeting rooms on floors undergoing renovation so we could play board games in them. It’s weird what is and isn’t a big boy job, and at that one, I got pretty good at the ten-key. But in sixth grade my prowess was limited to the…37-key? 38 if you count backspace, I guess, but I ain’t write back(space). I kicked ass at that thing. It was concerning to me, highly concerning, that my classmates couldn’t type, the same way someone in this house who works in schools comes home horrified when sixth-graders can’t read. Her horror is justified. Mine probably wasn’t. I’d just taken piano lessons and played a lot of Hardball 5.
Anyway, I was born to be a blogger, and now my physical tools are overpowering Bill Gates’s greatest creation. The machine has not been constructed which can handle these hands (and also not spontaneously shatter its screen on an airplane in the middle of my busiest month of the year).
