Penn & Teller PCC articles by Penn Jillette | Reprinted with permission. |
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It was a little after 4 AM last time you looked and that was a
while ago. At that time WordPerfect had been down for over an
hour but that's not WordPerfect's fault. It must be the
fileserver's fault or the network's fault. The last thing you
saw when WordPerfect was up was nonsense with a bit of your
document meagerly sprinkled throughout it. It went from page 3
to page 17 and then back again as you scrolled up and down. You
were panicking, thinking that the fact that 3 and 17 were both
prime numbers and the document was 51 pages long which wasn't
prime because it was divisible by itself, 1, 3 and 17 had to mean
something. While you were puzzling you saved, reflexively. You,
with your own idiot fingers hit F10 and, as if that wasn't stupid
enough, then you hit "Y." You wrote over the previous saved
document which was identical except for one "and but" after deliberation for 15 minutes. You were
going to change it back to the "and " anyway, that's why you were
on page 17 (now 3), that's when the prime number un-Turin-
crackable page code started up. While you were swearing at
yourself and turning off the CD player because you're too old for
that kind of music and it makes you jumpy, the timed backup
overwrote the WP{WP}.BK1 file. There still would have been
WP{WP}.BK2 , with a very close draft that even had the desired
"and " on page 17 (now 3), but on the home stretch you had used
DOC 2 to make a few notes in DOS text for your Email cover
letter. When WordPerfect changed it back from ASCII you saw that
the only note you had made was "Check this out, Bucko, on time!
Ha Ha Ha " You exited WP to use some utilities to save your ass
but you had loaded WordPerfect with your WP.BAT and that did your
very clever automatic backup to your A: drive that overwrote the
copy of the document that you saved at 7 PM, which was the last
time you were out of WP and the last time you ate and that was a
muffin. You swiftly unerased everything and found lots of 3-17-
17-3 gibberish and "Check this out, Bucko, on time! Ha Ha Ha " in
\WORK\WP{WP}.BK1 and BK2 . It's always made you a little
uncomfortable that WordPerfect lives in Utah but, hell, it's a
good program and makes you compatible with everyone in the known
world and you're never going to use the math columns anyway and
what do you know? -- There are probably fine normal people in
Utah and you can't judge everyone in their state and the whole
state's software output based on the only Utah woman you know who
eats egg salad and thinks VH1 is too racy. But right now you'd
kiss everyone in Utah on their egg salad mouths if the network
would just let you back into WordPerfect where at least you'd
have a chance of piecing part of the document back together.
You're sure your buddy, Colin, would be able to get you back into
WordPerfect and salvage your document and he wouldn't mind you
calling at dawn (it must be almost that now) but he's in Barbados
for long long wild weekend with Carol who's the only other person
that knows enough about this system to save your moron neck. You
remember the last time something bad happened he did something
with the autoexec.bat so you pull it up and you look at it in
SideKick and you put some command line parameters after IPX
that you vaguely remember are supposed to get you on the network with
no bells and whistles and you save it.
You hold your left middle finger extended to the world, bring it down the CTRL key. Keeping it there you press your index finger onto the ALT key. You take a deep breath, shrug your shoulders, smile and hit the DEL key. That's why you're voting for H. Ross Perot -- it just might boot up okay. |