Too Old for Peer Pressure? Never!
by Diane Chamberlain
Do I look like I'm having fun? You're right. I'm not!
Remember when you were a kid and all your friends started drinking, so you started drinking? Or when they sneaked out of their houses in the middle of the night to meet at the park and you joined them? Or they dove from the cliff above the quarry and you didn't want to look like a chicken, so you did it too? I guess that's why I now have a Mac. Almost every one of my writing friends uses a Mac. My grown stepdaughters and numerous other family members use Macs, too, and Mac users are zealots, oh yes they are. How they look down their noses at PCs! I figured I must be missing something. I'd been enjoying my new iPad immensely, so when my laptop recently died and my desktop started sputtering, I joined the lemmings and jumped into the Mac abyss. Never one to do things halfway, I now have an iPad, a Macbook Air and an iMac. And a week into this adventure, I also have a boatload of regret, matched only by my determination to conquer this bloody thing on my desk.
I plan to stick with it. I plan to take all the workshops and the one-on-one classes. I plan to learn everything I can and become a Mac Whiz, but no one will ever be able to convince me that a Mac is more intuitive (give me a break) or simpler or more elegant to use than a PC. If it's so intuitive, why am I stuck staring at a frozen screen five times a day, with a mouse doing unpredictable things and a message that pops up saying something like:
Simply click &*$@%F1-#$&*F12
Oh please. One click of the mouse on a PC and whatever I need it to do would be done. (I tried several ways to get the actual command in this post, but Typepad wouldn't allow me to put the command/option/control symbols, so I had to make do. Trust me, it looked nearly as silly as the above. So silly I laughed out loud.)
Where oh where is my right click?? I know where it is, but I resent having to press a keyboard button and the mouse at the same time when a right click on the mouse would be so much simpler.
My few friends who haven't yet been suckered into a Mac ask me "Why are you doing this to yourself??" Yes, there's the lemming factor, but there's something deeper going on. There's the challenge element--a desire to keep my mind supple and learning. Angry Birds and Sudoku just aren't enough. If you want to stretch your brain, try learning a new operating system. I can think of no better way. Just be sure you take your blood pressure medication before you start.
There's also hope. The hope that Mac lovers are right and I will someday come to appreciate all that a Mac can do. One of those things is running Scrivener, a program many of my novelist friends use for organizing their books. I'm an obsessive organizer when it comes to writing a novel, so I'm excited about that possibility. Though right now, I have to admit the thought of learning a whole new program is not appealing. Scrivener will be on the back burner for a bit.
(side note: I just heard a yelp of surprise from my bedroom. I'm trying to train my dogs not to jump on the bed.)
Back to the Mac. A significant problem I'm having is the keyboard. I've used an ergonomic keyboard for many years. It's raised in the middle and the keyboard is divided. It's perfect for fingers and wrists with rheumatoid arthritis. But finding a truly ergonomic keyboard that works with the Mac has proven to be a challenge. There are a few, but the keyboards are not split. Instead, they have a faux ergonomic wave shape. I finally found a truly ergonomic keyboard by Microsoft (the 7000 model). Although it doesn't have the same functionality as the Mac keyboard, I can set it up so that it's close, as long as I remember the Alt key is the command key and the Windows key is the option key, etcetera. The mouse that came with the keyboard has a nice feel beneath my palm, but it's so heavy and clunky that I quickly reached the top of my cuss-ometer while using it and I'm now trying to use the Mac mouse instead. It's too thin, so I must prop it up to avoid hurting my wrist. (propping here with Bland Simpson's wonderful book on The Inner Islands of North Carolina, which I bought while doing research for The Lies We Told.)
I don't understand Mac's organization for pictures either. What's the difference between the pictures folder and iPhoto? Is iPhoto a way to organize them? I had all my pictures copied over from my PC and some of them came over in duplicate and triplicate and quadruplicate—enough so that I now have over 13,000 images on my hard drive. I have a little clean up to do there! In the middle of trying to clean up last night, the mouse suddenly developed a mind of its own and began selecting hundreds of pictures at a time. I couldn't get it to stop. Kind of frightening! Around that time is when a facsimile of the above message popped up on my screen (Simply click &*$@%F1-#$&*F12), but my non-Mac keyboard left me stymied. Since I couldn't stop the madness occurring on my screen, I reached for my iPad, thinking I'd Google for help. As I reached forward, the crazy selecting process instantly stopped and the mouse returned to normal. I have no idea what I did to start it or stop it, but the next time something goes kaflooey, I plan to reach for my iPad again and see what happens.
Oh, and those "notes" on the right of my screen above were another thing that "got stuck". Clearly I'm doing something wrong.
One of my biggest bugaboos right now are these boring "aliases". When I wanted to put a shortcut on my PC desktop—say I wanted to go instantly to my Facebook Readers Page—I'd just right click and create a shortcut—a simple Facebook icon, for example. But every icon on the Mac is the same and butt ugly. I know there must be a way to make them prettier and more useful, but it's certainly not, ahem, intuitive.
I know what you Mac users are saying: "If she hates the Mac so much, let her go back to her virus-ridden PC!" But please reread my reasons for the switch. I really want to do this. I just desperately need to wail and moan for a while, okay?
My dogs and I are about the same age, if I think in terms of dog years. They've spent all their lives jumping up on the bed. If they can learn to stay off the bed, I can master this machine. Then again, they don't seem to be catching on to the whole tinfoil thing too quickly.
I'm done being a curmudgeon for today. Thanks for letting me get all that out of my system! I'll spend the rest of the day 'learning by doing'. Putting this post together on the Mac is the first step. It's now 12:06 pm. We'll see how long it takes. Then I'd love to hear what new things you're learning these days.
P.S. I think I'm finished. It's 5:26 pm. Sigh.
