Aiming For The Tiny Scroll Hole

The author in control

I get stumped by computery stuff from time to time, sure, but it's a lot better than it used to be. Computers got better, and I got better too. Shoot, when I first started word-processing, entire documents used to vanish in the ether. One stray keystroke and all of a sudden text was going backwards and smacking into margins and puddling up and I don't know what-all. I had to summon the fairy children next door to fetch it back.

But now I've got that stuff mostly under control and I'm also familiar with the processes required to get the stuff out into the world.

That was hard at first, too. Back in 2008 when I tried to upload the essay that ultimately won the FieldReport contest, I couldn't make it go. I had to get my friend Magic Beth. My computer was a big dumb horse that munched grass and wouldn't move and it knew perfectly well that I didn't know what I was doing. Beth would come over and saddle up and pop a heel and snap a rein and the horse was all Oh, fine and then it would take right off.

But I've kind of got it down now. And I do try to get the stuff out into the world. You don't get as impressive a stack of rejection letters as I have by not sending stuff out.

Not that anyone's making it easy. Take Tin House, for instance. Tin House is a lovely and highly-regarded press that publishes about a half-dozen books a year, but that doesn't stop me from thinking mine should be one of them. Guess the hell what? They take submissions for non-fiction books two days a year. September 4th and September 5th. That's it.

So come the morning of September 4th, I jumped right on it. They use a form. Name, preferred pronouns (aw), overview, short bio, and your first chapter. Uploading your first chapter is a snap. You hit the button that says "Upload File" and it brings up a window with a list of everything on your desktop. You double-click the document you want and BOOP BOOP it gets sucked into the form. I do it all the time.

Not this time. This time everything on my desktop list is grayed out. That means you can't BOOP BOOP on it. I have no idea what I've done wrong, but I can't get my chapter into their form. They want it formatted as a Word document or a PDF, and my chapter is totally a Word document. I spanked it over from the Mac program myself. But it won't light up.

I never use PDF. I don't even know why there have to be so many formats. It's like screwdrivers. Just do flat-head and Phillips and be done with it. But no. As far as I can tell, PDF is this real old-fashioned-looking deal that comes spiral-bound and looks like someone scanned a printed book. I see no point in it at all. But just for the hell of it, I spanked my document over into a PDF, and then tried to upload it, and it lit right up and BOOP BOOP got sucked right into the form. So. Done!

But what the hell?

Turns out the form was looking for all the DOC files on my desktop and it didn't light any up because I don't have any, because that format got retired fourteen years ago. DOC and DOCX are both Word formats but DOCX has been the norm since 2007. My computer doesn't even recognize it. So for once the fault is with the submission form and not me. When they asked for DOC and PDF documents, they were giving us writers a choice. We could create a big thick PDF document on spiral-bound 8.5x11 bond paper and shove it over the transom. Or we could do a Word doc from the last century on parchment rolled into a scroll and poked through their tiny scroll hole.

I hope my chapter made a nice satisfying whump when it sailed over the transom.

Laundry On Line Too

Toilet's leaking. Every five minutes it slurps in more water pssssh for a second. I figured the tank was losing a smidge of water and refilling. Just to make sure I looked it up on Mr. Internet and yes indeedy it's a flapper issue. An easy fix. You drain the tank, pull off the old flapper, go to the hardware store with it and have the nice lady pick you out a new matching one, and snap it back on. So I did. Felt pretty cool about it too, especially since I injected the enterprise with extra virtue by walking two miles to the hardware store and back.

It worked great! If what I was after was having it slurp in more water pssssh every minute instead of every five minutes.

So Mr. Internet has a million entries on replacing a flapper, and all of them agree on the procedure, and that it's a slam dunk. Guess what? If you search for "replaced flapper toilet still leaking" you get another million hits. Hey, it's a thing! Unfortunately this fix isn't as easy, but there's a replacement kit you can install in your toilet. Adhesive is involved. This is starting to sound like plumbing.

The other thing it's starting to sound like is computers. Suddenly I'm not so confident that the new fix is actually going to work. Suddenly I'm not as motivated to even try. It's like what happens when something you've always done on the computer quits working. You Google it. You go to the search bar and type: "blog blows up for no fucking reason."

You get back a whole forum. Someone out there has the exact same problem as you. Cool! She puts it out to the community and gets answers. They sound something like this:

"Sounds like it's probably a function of an overactive html weasel. Try going into the Computer Intestines tab and pull down the Flappination menu. Click 'weasel hyperactivity' and uncheck the 'flappination is on' box. Click save settings. Now open a new document and let a fourteen-pound cat stroll across the keyboard.  Highlight and copy result. Open your browser and go to File>Settings>WeaselControl and paste the code into the box. Hit Save. Close out this window and open another window, look for the toolbar that is not available on your model, close out, click the Install button, check the box that says you agree to do whatever Victoria or Nelson in Bombay says, click Shut Down, wait twelve hours, and restart. That should do it."

Sure enough, there's a cheery note underneath from the original questioner that says "Thanks a lot, Splatmaster, that worked great!" So you give it a go.

The next day you go to the neighbor's house to borrow their computer and search for "Computer poots out blue smoke at reboot."

I turned off the water intake valve for the toilet and mentally clicked "Ignore." I had laundry to do. Laundry I understand. Within the hour, I had achieved serenity. It's done with wooden clothespins in your mouth. All your sheets and towels and underpants are on the line. Solar power is brought to bear for free. Everything dries crisp. It's a beautiful dang thing. Works first time, every time.

An Open Bag Of Internet

If there's an open bag of potato chips in the house, I'm going to hoover them up, and I'm the same way with the internet. You open a bag of internet and I'm going in head-first, and I'll still be up at one in the morning dabbing at the little salty bits on the bottom. So if I want to air out my brainwaves, I try to go places it can't reach, like our backwards little cabin. Or I go for a walk without taking any of the fun-size internet snack devices. If I don't respond right away to your comments, it's probably because I'm deliberately off the grid.

But not always. Sometimes I'm just dealing with random computer obstrepery. The other day I'm flying along tacking up comments in this space when for no reason whatsoever I click on the "reply" button and nothing happens. I have a plan, because I wasn't just born yesterday. If I had been born yesterday, I'd probably have a better plan. I click harder. I really do. I center the cursor, I press down with due deliberation, I wait an extra beat, then I let up. I do this because every now and then the computer, which is having gastric distress, happens to relieve itself at the very moment I am pressing on the button. So I have convinced myself I fixed it. Because that's how cause-and-effect works. It works however you want it to. If it didn't, there wouldn't be so many people using the phrase "job-killing taxes."

But most of the time clicking harder doesn't work. And if I decide to ignore its little snit, and play somewhere else on the internet, I soon discover that the whole thing is acting up. It is acting like the sullen teenager you have given a simple task to, balking and scuffling its feet. Sometimes you can even see its impudent little eyes rolling. That's when you give it a time-out. That's what the techies usually tell me to do when I call them--pull the plug.

What a quaint expression! It harkens back to the days when things had A Plug, and you could Pull It. What I have in the nether regions of my desk looks like it should come with meatballs and a nice Chianti. I hover over the assemblage with the trepidation of the new guy on the bomb squad. I have a black cord, a white cord, a green cord, and a yellow cord, and several boxes they are servicing. One of them is a modem, I don't know which one, and one of them is, I believe, the Flux Capacitor, function unknown. I select the black cord and pull it out of the two boxes. The chip clip is now back on the bag and it's on a high shelf in the cupboard.

Now it's time to get something useful done.

Well, that's the trouble with kids. You'd think the moody little bastards would be real easy to ignore, once you've sent them to their room, but after a while you start thinking about how great they could be if only they applied themselves, and you let them back out.

The adolescent computer is better than my new printer, which is more like an alcoholic husband. When it's working, it's fast as hell. Spits out a page like it's throwing a beer can across the room. Other times you ask nicely and it starts to work and then shuts right down in the middle of it, and that's supposed to be your fault. Next day it's sweet as pie. Classic abusive behavior, designed to keep you off balance. But I'm no dewy-eyed bride. I am going to fix that thing, as soon as I locate a hatchet.

This stuff used to get to me more than it does now. Dealing with computer moodiness in the early days used to aggravate me no end, because it made me feel so stupid. My friend Walter used to talk me down, using an observation I never heard anyone else make. "These machines haven't been around very long," he said. "They're just not that good yet."

Pointing out another classic cause-and-effect fallacy, he told me: "just because you have trouble with them doesn't mean you're stupid." And that is true.

Of course, it doesn't rule it out.