Penn & Teller    PCC articles by Penn Jillette        Reprinted with permission.

An Analogy

Penn Jillette

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 "andbut" 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.