Techno? Heck, no!

One thing I've had to do in the past 16 years is form an uneasy alliance with computer technology. When Sally bought our first computer, an IBM PS-2, in 1992, I had screaming fits of frustration in trying to deal with the obstinate beast. Computers were designed by engineers and people who did not look at the way things work in the real world, but how in their heads they wanted them to work, and then forced the rest of us to have to work it their way.

Here we are a decade-and-a-half later and I'm still fighting the equipment. I bought a laptop for Sally's birthday, and that was OK to set up because computers have--thank the geek gods--gotten a bit more friendly to us users. Then I bought a LinkSys wireless router. The first router crashed after two days so I took it back to Best Buy and got another. That one I had to configure three times before getting it to finally do what it's supposed to do. Last night I did the easiest thing of all, get Sally a wireless mouse. Those things are great. Pop 'em in and they start working. Hallelujah.

My latest computer woe is software related. For years, since the late '90s at least, I've used a program called CompuPic 5.2. It's an antique now, kind of a poor man's PhotoShop. As a photo editor CompuPic has been simple to use and very user friendly, until the other night when it turned on me. I usually save all my photos as JPEGs, because they take up less room and JPEG is compatible with everything, but the other night in the middle of a project I did some editing and when I saved it it turned into this:

It's some sort of digital abstraction. No matter what I did, everything I saved in JPEG format turned into this gray blob of pixels. Having obsessive-compulsive disorder puts me at a disadvantage, because I can't just shrug my shoulders and say, "Oh, well," then go on and do something using another program. I don't have another program I like as much as I like CompuPic. So I went to bed after tussling with it for an hour or more past my usual bedtime, and while I was able to fall asleep, woke up a couple of hours later with the gears in my brain spinning, working on the problem. I got back up. The simplest solution, after experimenting, is to save everything I scan as a bitmap file. CompuPic doesn't mind bitmaps. It adds a step for me, because then I go to another program I use, Paint Shop Pro, and save the bitmap as a JPEG. It's a solution only in the sense that I can make it work. As a real solution to my problem--what the hell is going on that makes CompuPic think a saved JPEG looks like the picture above?--it's unsatisfying.

Something else that socks in another gray hair is the computer's way of making you think you did something wrong, the old "fatal error" message that has sent heart attacks to unwary users when it pops up. What I've found from years of feudin', fussin' and fightin' with these recalcitrant machines is that it isn't my fault. It's the fault of some geeky engineer who designed the damn program in the first place, and whose brain doesn't work the same way a normal brain works.

(The great-looking photo of "The Personalities" is something my friend Dave Miller found in a thrift store. I'm sure this toothsome threesome put on quite a show. Anything with an accordion has just gotta be great!)