Finding a better way

When I left my old job, I turned in my laptop. I’d carried it for the last several years, bringing it back and forth between home and the office every day. Because I could be confident that I’d always have it with me, it was the machine I used for most of what I did, including writing. All of my important files were backed up on my home computer every night, but I still used the work computer whenever I needed to deal with them.

With the work computer returned to the company and no longer available to me, I sat down recently to work on a document from my home PC. This machine has a slightly different version of Microsoft Word on it than the work computer did, so I was a little bit nervous about how it might work out. It turns out that I had good reason to be worried.

Word pretty much destroyed all of the formatting in my document. It mashed all of the indentation, the formatting of block quotes, punctuation, and altered all of the section and subsection headings so that the entire table of contents was useless. Then, to add insult to injury, the program repeated its “improvements” each time I tried to correct them. I hate it when software is so confident it’s smarter than I am that it refuses to let me make decisions, and even worse, when it actively thwarts me in the decisions it pretends to offer.

With my 220 page document ruined, it was suddenly very worth my time to find a better option. Being the sort of obstinate person I am, I went whole-hog, and began experimenting with not just a different word processor, but a whole new paradigm in how I am writing this particular text.