The Joys of Computing

When at 9:30pm the dreaded poster is finally taking shape, to be printed out early the next day, and a fuzzy feeling of happy relaxation invades the bodily cavities, for the body's owner is to go home soon, and when then just seconds later, upon pressing the oft used keystroke combination of CTRL-SHIFT-LEFT in order to mark a word that is to be taken out of the beautiful composition of the poster, for it to become even more beautiful, Illustrator suddenly and quite unexpectedly vanishes without a peep, an error message or indeed any sign of distress other than its complete and utter diappearance, the contrast between the mentioned feeling of fuzzyness and the ensuing shock is not alleviated by the discovery that neither saved versions nor temporary files exist and the work of the last four hours is lost.

But when, four hours later, the very same keystroke (which, I hasten to add, did work just as intended many, many times in the four hours preceding this second incident) produces the very same result, the realization that in spite of knowing of this grave danger once again no intermediate versions have been saved, the feeling of anger toward the material world, the quality of which was of such at the first incident that a visible dent in the wall testifies silently, is replaced by one of personal inadequacy and general hopelessness.

Unfortunately, the fact that when the same thing happens yet another time the following day, a version of the file has been saved just seconds before, does not compensate with a feeling of joyful elation that can rival either of the previous evenings unpleasant cognitive events. Most unfair, that.