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To Tell the Truth

I own a Concorde Supersonic airliner. It can carry 100 passengers in luxurious comfort and at unbelievable speeds. . I haven't yet figured out how to get the thing off the ground. I can only manage to taxi it slowly in first gear, and I use it to take stuff to the dump.

Of course, this is not the unvarnished truth of the matter, but metaphorically there is honesty in what I have told you. What I term an SST is actually a computer of mind-boggling capabilitywhich is to say, an ordinary iBook G4. Seated at its keyboard, I display the same mastery that I once exhibited on my non-electric Smith-Corona portable-an earlier machine which I used to coax up to nearly Mach 40 words per minute with no fear of sonic boom or aluminum skin crawl.

I am utterly dumbfounded that I don't have to wind paper into a carriage and hit a return lever when I hear a signal bell. It has a little thing called a mouse, which I keep dropping on the floor. With the mouse firmly in a stranglehold, I can click on any of a score of words and symbols in something called the menu bar. Then hundreds of manipulations are at my beck and call. I, however, have learned to restrict my mousing to the basics- commands like Quit, Close, Save, Print, Shut Down, and blessed Sleep. I studiously avoid involvement with such cabala as Toolbars, with its boxes of strange images that I am invited to Reset or Customize. (I'd sooner reset the solar system and customize my grandmother!) Once I went browsing in Hyperlink, thinking it might be some sort of cyber golf course geared for high handicappers, but the screen message befuddled me with directions to find and/or name anchors. Why would I want to name an anchor? What would you name such an object? Anchor What?

Other screen invitations resonate with a dangerous-maybe even a deadly-note: Bullets and Numbering. I'm sure there is a bullet in there somewhere with my number on it, and I intend to dodge it no matter what I may sacrifice in terms of order, regularity, and classification. The Format menu offers me the option to Drop Cap, even though I'm always humbly and respectfully bareheaded at the keyboard.

Remember the old "Typewriter Song" where to a melodic accompaniment you heard a succession of Underwood ratatats and dings? Think what Leroy Anderson could have done with a computer! My box has a repertoire that includes swallowing noises, belches, grunts, rattlesnake warnings, and unspeakable sounds too numerous to list- culminating in a thunderous

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