Writing Samples

Man’s newest best friend
by Kevin Dowler

Speed, perfection, all can be yours with the mighty computer.

That’s the message we are given by the ads showing the well dressed and obviously successful, smart looking people sitting behind their white computers in a white and well ordered room.

“Perfection. I could do with a dose of that,” I keep telling myself, trying to convince myself to become part of the future where every home is run by a computer.

The prices were an easy enough deterrent to stop me from joining the club until on one my better days of procrastination, a computer store found its way into my path.

Across the mall, on a banner printed with one of the store’s computers, I read the words, “Save time and buy a computer”.

That was it. I was caught and the rest of my day was spent rebounding from walls of computer terminals to walls of computer monitors to walls of computer software.

Once my eyes got that glassy glare resembling the many monitors, the salesman knew he had me pegged.

He had me lined up with software (that’s computer lingo for well priced and packaged time saving devices), to choose my socks, to set my grocery list and to do my writing.

Do my writing?

Hey, I have got to have one of those on my list.

Everything was fine until the ever growing cash register slip kept adding up to a larger and even more unfathomable number.

Hiding behind my bright blushing cheeks, I said farewell to the salesman whose blood pressure nearly dropped to zero after losing such a highly anticipated sale.

As I turned the corner round the store I saw the salesman reading a software guide for a program called Supersale: the salesman’s time saving guide to profit.

I’m sure my description as a consumer must qualify as a syntax error somewhere in his program.

A syntax error is a computer’s polite way of saying you messed up.

So I began burying my face in newspaper classified pages in search of my very own time saving device.

After a few too many visits to homes of pale skinned, wide-eyed computer addicts, I finally found my machine.

It’s a beauty and it’s my new friend.

Our relationship is great while we are playing the fun and games programs that came with the deal but when we interface with the word processor programs we are basically incompatible.

I want it to print in English and it insists on some garbled foreign language that looks like it was borrowed from one of the space computer games.

When I want to edit, it wants to erase.

With the computer I may have found perfection, but what I am still searching for, is all this promised saved time.

I can get my stories typed faster but trying to get them off the disk and onto paper ends all of the time saved.

After realizing that an instruction book is beneficial for more than a coffee mug holder, I think I may one day get to the point of actually saving time with this machine.

It’s amazing the difference between what a comma and a semicolon can do with a program.

Use one and the computer prints English and use the other and I get Betelgeusian.

The computer teaches us to follow the rules that don’t bend. Quite nice, don’t you think?
Imagine what life will be like once the kids who are now using computers grow up.

They will follow the set rules. What great and programmable political candidates they will make.

Or maybe it will be the other way round, with the rich and powerful setting the programs to be set on the masses.

Pretty scary stuff. I think when things get tough I’ll take refuge in a computerized hockey game.

The only thing that bothers me now is who gets credit for the stories I write with my new machine. Me or my computer?