In the white heat of rhetoric, my word processor froze up. I don’t have much time for writing with my commuting schedule, so the full forty-five minutes lost between the typing of a letter “s” that apparently caused the meltdown and being able to access my text was lost in a prayer that my work hadn’t been lost. I remember the days when everyone used Microsoft Word and there was this joke going around about the Devil and Jesus being tested on their computer skills. I can’t remember the joke but I do recall the punchline: “Jesus saves!” So it was in those days that you had to hit “save” every few minutes or your work would be lost. Many laments could be loudly heard of students having lost an entire paper because they’d forgotten their prophylactic “save”s. I found that working on a Mac that such problems weren’t always so bad. But then, system upgrades became more frequent. Two programs that you needed open simultaneously, Word and Internet Explorer (called something else in those days, but I can’t remember what), were a sure recipe for mutually assured destruction. The memory required would freeze even an Apple to its core, and so the systems gurus made improvements and things got better.

Of course, those of us who’ve spend the Gross Domestic Product of a small country on Apple devices have been lulled to complacency. Over the years (since the fiasco of the original iMac) we’ve come to learn that Apple will save our work, and that crashes, while infrequent, will bring our files back onto the screen after recovery. You really don’t need to save since autosave is capable of being the messiah of all computer files. Then the gurus upgraded the system. For the past several months I can’t run a word processor and internet browser simultaneously on my computer without freezing up the system. Imagine my chagrin when, having less than an hour to write, copy, paste, and post my blog entry for the day, my word processor decides that it doesn’t recognize the letter “s.” Of course, Apple long ago stopped being compatible with Microsoft Word. Those of us who used both Macs and Word cheered when the two finally became compatible about a decade ago, but in the battle for computer supremacy, we no longer have that option. My Mac can open Word files and save documents as Word files, but it can’t run Word. Instead it runs word processors that don’t recognize that most rare of characters, the insidious “s.”

So I went to back up my files over the weekend. I keep some files on a memory stick (so called) because they take up a lot of space and I don’t use them that often. The memory stick failed in the middle of a save (doesn’t Jesus save anymore?) and I spent an entire Saturday trying to recover files that were already saved. According to some Christian traditions, once saved, always saved. You can’t be unsaved. After losing an enormous amount of work that equated to many hours of precious weekend time, I’m beginning to have my doubts about my faith. Using Pages, Apple’s version of Word, is sure to lead to a crash. This has been happening since at least September. I get systems upgrades more frequently than calls from telemarketers. I really don’t ask for much. I’ve got about an hour to get my writing done in the morning and I would really, really appreciate it if forty-five minutes of that hour weren’t taken up by Pages trying to recognize the letter “s.” After all, not even Jesus can save without it.

In the beginning was Word…