Whoever said they don’t let the little things bother them must have never traveled with a laptop computer.
Last week, while I was on assignment in Puerto Rico, the pointer device on my portable developed a small problem. It decided to ignore every command to move left or right. No amount of coaxing, rebooting, or praying could get the clicker to budge.
Having a half-functioning mouse is kind of like driving a car where the brakes only work every other time. It’s not worth the risk or the trouble unless you’re in a life-or-death emergency. Fortunately, our friends at Microsoft included a list of keyboard operating commands in their latest system, and theoretically – I stress the theoretically here – I should have been able to work the machine without the mouse, using these “hot keys” or keyboard shortcuts.
Note to the software engineers in Redmond, Wash.: nice try.
Hot keys are the secret handshakes of computer users. I hate them. They’re impossible to remember, and terribly unforgiving if you make a mistake. I know some users who do everything with these crafty keyboard shortcuts and look down their noses at those of us trapped in WYSIWYG land. I hate them too.
Pity the traveler who is stuck in a hotel room with a malfunctioning mouse, who has never used a so-called keyboard “shortcut”. For that poor sap, it’s do or die – learn how to close a window without using a mouse, or how to save a file sans point-and-click, or miss a deadline trying. I would rather be driving a car without brakes, thank you very much.
Two things happen when your pointer goes kaput on a trip. First, you realize how totally reliant you are on something so small and seemingly insignificant. And second, it is made clear to you how stupid you’ve been for not spending just a little more time with the Word manual, maybe learning how to do something basic like, say, opening a file, without the benefit of a pointer.
In my sad case, I resorted to the ever popular trial-and-error method. I randomly pressed a combination of keys, like Control-ALT-Shift-O, hoping that it might maybe open a new file, only to get a message that asked, “Do you REALLY want to erase your entire disk drive? Yes/No”
Yes, yes, yes. I wanted to click yes, because by that time, I was so angry at the notebook that I was ready to play Frisbee with it. I rubbed the pointer, I picked at the pointer, I tapped at the pointer, but the damned thing wouldn’t move a millimeter to the left or right.
After cooling off a little, I returned to the keyboard.
New file. Now let’s see. Control-N. Or was it ALT-N? No, it was Control-ALT-N. No, no, Shift-Control-ALT-N. Every time I did something wrong, I hit ESC to undo the damage, until the notebook got so confused that it froze. I rebooted the machine, cursing and swearing as it hummed and whirred its way back to the startup screen.
I’ve interviewed frequent travelers that take extreme precautions when they’re on the road. One is so afraid that his pointer will stop working that he carries a Ziploc full of spares with him. When it shows the slightest hint of heading south, he replaces it. Another traveler I know carries a mouse with his laptop, not just because he doesn’t trust the pointer, but because he can’t stand the way it handles.
There’s got to be a better way. Our laptops shouldn’t be held hostage to a fragile pointing device any more than they should be dependent on us memorizing a string of obscure keyboard commands to operate them. We might as well return to the bad old days of DOS.
The only other option, as far as I can see, is some kind of speech recognition technology. But speech recognition is the Edsel of our era. You could install a speech recognition program on your laptop, but it may very well be the last thing that you do before completely having to reformat your hard drive and starting from square one.
Is the solution a more reliable control system or a less code-intensive one? Maybe a little of both. Manufacturers shouldn’t build flimsy pointers. That’s a given. They should offer redundancies for those of us who don’t care to memorize the keyboard commands. Perhaps a second system, like a touchpad or a joystick. For those of us who want the keyboard shortcuts, a clear tutorial might be helpful, if not a list of keyboard commands that can be affixed to the computer, for folks like me who don’t have the sharpest memory.
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