Damnable MS Word

I always thought the idea was far-fetched that robots could take on a life of their own. Until I encountered the latest version of Microsoft Word (MSW). This damnable program seems to do its own thing in my computer. With some time and effort I have learned to disable its more annoying features, stuff like its desire to automatically underscore and apply a garish color to an email or a web address, its efforts to substitute a phrase (TOLL ROADS NEWSLETTER) for a word (TOLL), and its odd notion of formatting numbered lists with indented text. The thing will take a perfectly good page of text with paragraphs separated by two or three indented character spaces at the beginning, and reformat them all with a flush sentence start and a missing line between each paragraph.

There’s a sense of triumph, of man suppressing the machine-beast, when you’ve ‘disabled’ the bastard after tediously going through lists of ‘preferences’ and ‘tools’ and clicked the right boxes. It’s tedious, a waste of time, one of life’s little irritants, you think. You’ve won one.

But, godammit, it’s only a temporary respite you get, because after a few days of good behavior, all of a sudden MSW’s back to its old tricks. Somehow it recalls a bunch of the old settings – inerasable default settings or somesuch? – and goes back to messing you up with its eccentricities. You have to disable it all over again! I do it regularly and so do millions of other MSW sufferers. No wonder the Feds see such political gain in going after Microsoft!

We need that clever “Love Bug” hacker in Manilla to write an anti-MSWord app that would lay in wait for the devilish MSWord to misbehave, and then wrestle it to the ground, so to speak.