The Great Under-Thirty Conspiracy

Do you know what I hate/abhor/become homicidal about? I loathe being twenty minutes into writing an email or blog post, and then for some reason my finger touches the wrong button and whatever text I’ve written disappears into the electronic abyss. Of course, there’s an “undo” button, but I type very fast and by the time the text vanishes I’ve typed a couple of letters. When I hit the undo button, a “d” or an “s” pops up.

I’ve spoken to the technological geniuses of my home about the situation. Their response is “you shouldn’t type so fast.” Right, that makes me feels better. This morning I was halfway through a blog post and the computer ate it. Who programs these text-eaters? I imagine it’s some skinny kid who’s almost 18 and has been working at Microsoft for 5 years. I don’t know why he wants to make my life miserable. But I’m guessing it’s something like the following: he stayed up too late and his mom had to wake him up to get to work on time. She had to nag him to shower. Then for breakfast she gave him oatmeal instead of Coco Puffs. Then, horror of horrors she ran out of the good coffee and made Folgers instead. (Being forced to drink Folgers would do it for my kids. Folgers would make them ready to lock and load. Actually, when we run out of good coffee, my children send very whiney emails to my mother begging for good coffee since their mother is poisoning them with the cheap stuff.)

At any rate, back to our skinny programmer. He determines to punish all fast typists who are over the age of thirty, of whom his mother is one. So he programs in a “short cut,” which is something along the lines of “double shift Z” or “shift alt.” Some combination of keys that pre-arthritic fingers stumble over. Then he laughs and tells all of his buddies.

A child (Jacob) reading over my shoulder just announced to me, “Hey, Mom, the short cut to delete chunks of text is ‘shift, page-down, and then hit any other key.’” How does he know that?! We don’t have a Short-Cuts Manual lying around the house. I’m sure it must be some great under thirty conspiracy.