A Thank You to My Computer

I have frequently written blogs about all the things I don't like about computers. It's not that I have any nostalgia for the typewriter, the carbon paper between the sheets, the typex, and the retyping of the whole sheet – and sometimes more than one – when you wanted to change anything, but I admit that I do get distinctly tetchy when the thing inexplicably freezes, or the great Gods of Technology decide to update the system in a way that is infinitely less user-friendly than the previous one.

Today, though, I decided I would be cheerful and positive and write for once about the features that I am grateful for, sometimes even very grateful for.

Spellcheck, of course, comes in at the top of the list since I'm an extremely careless typist. I even forgive it for changing my perfectly correct English spelling into American (we did it first, after all) because it definitely means well. ( Even in my present charitable frame of mind, though, I can't feel warmly towards the interfering grammar check which I have firmly switched off. My grammar is better than its is.)

Cut and Paste is another benevolent feature, particularly for what I call Cut and Stash. How often I deleted a passage in an editing frenzy and regretted it afterwards when I realised I could have used it somewhere else, and now I never will recapture that first, fine careless rapture! Now I have a document where all the cut passages are pasted in case they are needed later. I like it to come up handily at the top of the file list so it's called Aardvark. Endlessly useful.

I love Find. This is what stops me endlessly repeating my favourite phrases; I realised that I used 'obviously' far too much when the message came up that there were, frankly, too many to enumerate. It's also handy linked with Replace when I want to change a character's name, though I do always click it one at a time. A doctor who was replacing the letter 'B' that had represented a family's name in a redacted report used Replace All to restore the family's real name for circulation to the services directly involved and received several confused calls about the new disease, Hepatitis Blenkinsop.

And I am very particularly grateful for the Schedule panel. That is what allows me to write this now and tuck it away for a date when I shall be sitting on a terrasse in the Dordogne, without a thought in the world beyond wondering vaguely what time it would be reasonable to pour the next glass of a cheeky little Sauvignon Blanc Semillion. Cheers!