UNDO THE WRONG THING
My Gawd, but working with a PC can be a real spoiler. I'm not just talking about refusing to hand-write something when you have a perfectly good copy of MS Word you can boot up. I'm not even referring to spending time on the fastest machine in your general vicinity, then feeling that everything else is just a bit...sluggish. No, no, no, there are things you take for granted on that PC of yours that can intrude on your everyday life.
Fer instance: have you ever started to dial a phone number, realized you've mis-keyed it, and reached for the "Backspace" key? I find myself doing that all the time. But when you sit back and reflect, wouldn't that be a more efficient way of doing things? It would sure beat the bejabbers outta misdialing, slamming the hook down, cursing a few times, then starting from scratch! I can change one letter in the middle of a 400-page document -- hell, I can change one byte in a multi-meg file -- why the *$%@# can't I edit a seven-digit phone number?
Another thing: how many times have you pressed the wrong elevator button by accident? Wrong floor, wrong direction, whatever. And there's no way to correct it, so you stand there looking and feeling stoopid. By jing, there's a situation just begging for an "Undo" key. ('Specially good in my building, where I regularly push both the passenger and freight 'vator buttons and take whichever comes first. Give me a "Cancel" button, and I'd be more than willing to push it to prevent the second-car-to-arrive from showing up on an empty floor.)
Heck, it's not just computers; lots of modern devices can spoil ya. Take yer garden-variety VCR remote control. I've lost track of the times I've seen something flash by on the regular TV and reached for the "clicker" to review what I saw -- only to mentally kick myself and mutter "Dammit, Dix, that was real, not Memorex!"
What it is, we get used to doing something the easy way in one aspect of our lives, and can't stand the fact that we can't apply that same method across the board. It's kinda like the scene in ANNIE HALL when Woody Allen's arguing with another guy about Marshall MacLuhan, and Allen pulls the real MacLuhan out from behind a potted palm to demolish the other guy's argument. Allen to camera: "Why can't reality be this easy?"
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