Let joy be unconfined!
The booklet making program has been successfully installed in my major computer. I would like to say that I was fully in control of the download, and I knew what I was doing. But that would be a lie. I don’t really know what I was hoping for. I think that I was hoping that there should be a sort of sympathetic osmosis, and that the program that I installed in my laptop would gravitate toward installing itself in my upstairs computer and that all things would be well.
But that didn’t happen. I even considered buying another copy of the program because it is so insanely useful for my purposes. But there was always the nagging memory that in part of the documentation that I printed out for the program there was a mention of it being available for six other family members. If that was true, then there must have been some way in which I could have downloaded it onto another of my computers.
The problem as I saw it, was that the program interacted with my printer downstairs, and I wanted it to work with the computer upstairs. (And, yes, doesn’t everyone have more than one printer?). But there was no clear indication of how to transfer the program from one machine to another. I even downloaded the receipt from the Apple Store to see if there was some sort of code or registration number that I could use to extend the program to another machine. But there was nothing useful that I could see.
In a wistful attempt, more to show willing, than to show that I knew anything about how to install the program, I loaded the information about the program and, lo and behold, there in the top right corner was a little download symbol. On which I clicked, and which did as it suggested it might do, and downloaded the program. And it worked.
I have worked with (those last two words are probably only an approximation of professionalism) computers for decades, as I am an enthusiastic early adopter of digital technology. But I cannot say that I know much more about the actual workings of the programs that I use, in the sense of how they have been formulated, than I knew when I started, starry eyed, wondering about the possibilities of what could be achieved with such magical machines.
In the very early days of personal computers, I did waste a great deal of time pretending that I was interested in programming the things before the eventual realization that I was a User (with a capital ‘U’) rather than a programmer. I would have spent the time that I wasted on creating mindlessly simple programs that did nothing far better by paying more detailed attention to what a program could do.
It is a truism, accepted by virtually everyone, that most Users use only a tiny percentage of the capabilities of any program. Time would be more productively spent in learning what a program can do than trying to work out just how it does what it does.
As I am working on a chapbook of poems at the moment, the importance of the program that is now working in both my computers is that I can complete the whole process of creating of the raw poetic material to the production of a completed chapbook ‘in-house’.
And this new program is even supposed to indicate the optimal spot for the placement of the staples when I have folded it, and it is ready to be assembled!
This is just one of the multitudes of ‘features’ that the program offers, in a list bewildering in its expansiveness. I will, like most Users, find a simple path to get what I think I want, and then stick to it through thick and thin, not venturing into the rarefied regions of professionalism that the program holds out to the unwary buyers.
I wonder if I can get a rebate for only using a tiny percentage of the possibilities. A 50% return on investment might be encouraging. But I know that I will count my blessings and be grateful that I will no longer be hurling vituperative invective at the printer as it fails, yet again, to do what I want it to do.
For 22 euros, it is a small price to pay for peace of mind and a clean mouth!
No comments:
Post a Comment