Did you know that you can type the words “hate computer” in the search functions of both Flickr and iStock and get a combined total of 7000 hits? You know what that means, don’t you? I am not alone!

Like I said last time, I’m getting there. I’m learning this little laptop monster and getting fairly comfortable with it. But I admit to growing weary of the little surprises.

Just as a reminder, I had to give up on Mozilla Firefox thanks to my inability to download Adobe Flash Player for it. Which means I’m stuck with Internet Explorer. Which means that I lost my WiseStamp signature I worked so hard to develop. Since my email address is with Yahoo!, I’m stuck with them to develop a new signature. Let me tell you–they have no imagination, no clue of what needs to go in a signature that doubles as a marketing tool.

While I’m on the “IE Complaint” subject, I can’t tell you how many times IE told me it’s no longer working.  Seriously? This is a new computer, with an updated version of IE. How can it not work?!

Once I calm down from this incredibly frustrating week, I’ll go on the prowl for a new browser and a new email service. I used IncrediMail for awhile, but it was getting funky long before I bought this little monster, so I’ll have to find something else.

What’s killing me, though, isn’t just the computer. I installed my favorite word processing program, a variation of which I’ve used since the ’80s–WordPerfect5. Let me tell ya: those folks have now “new and improved” themselves right out of a good product. Some of the functions I could do with a touch of a button now bring entirely different results. Half the time I can’t find what I’ve saved. At one point, I thought I had it all figured out and finished the last three chapters of a manuscript edit, saved it with this feeling of satisfaction that I actually did get something done this week besides groan about my computer, and mailed it back to the author.

He couldn’t open it.

I tried to open it from the email I sent him, and guess what? It wasn’t there. It said it was there, but the file was empty. You’ve heard the saying: “Lights are on, but nobody’s home”? Yeah. That fits.

Let me recap: I have worked on WordPerfect for nigh unto thirty years and have never lost a document. Never.

Granted, this one was tricky. I had to translate it from Open Office to Word and mail it to myself to get it on this machine. WP freaked out about the Word version, though (for reasons I don’t understand, because it’s supposed to be able to work with Word), so I transferred it to WP format, which he could open with his Open Office program.

When he said he couldn’t open it–i.e. it wasn’t there to open, I went back to where I’d saved the document so I could translate it to rich text format, and that’s when I discovered it was gone. Nowhere to be found.

You’re kiddin’ me, right???

I had to kick start my oldie-goldie, the computer whose quirks of no WiFi, shot battery, and cranky power cord are beginning to seem charming by comparison, pull up the manuscript, and send it from there. Sans the last three chapters’ worth of edit.

I have two other manuscripts to edit, my own to prep for the agent, and three more I’m writing, and I can’t have this program messing with me! As much as I hate the idea, I may have to reinstall Word and figure it out. Or figure out how to force Norton to accept Open Office. Or–and this is a good possibility–reinstall WordPerfect3, which I now remember fondly as being quirk-free with functions living inside the keys they’re supposed to live in.

Ah, the good old days. Hard to believe they were just last week.