Microwave Turd

Few things in life are as gratifying as stapling your genitals to a lump of raw steak and running through the lion enclosure at Chester Zoo. I’m thinking of trying it.

But why, pray tell, is this course of action beginning to appeal to me? Am I some sado-masochistic adrenaline junkie who yearns for my own vapid MTV show?

No. It’s because I’ve just spent the evening using Microsoft Word.

I want my brain back

If they ever invent a car that runs on frustration there will be an infinite supply available to bottle up as long as this so-called software is available. I’m at a loss as to who to thump first; the person who designed the application form I was trying to fill out, or Microsoft’s design team who came up with a tool so flawed that it allowed people to design such a bad form in the first place.

Clearly, whoever put the form together never tried filling it out or they’d have realised that typing your address into the relevant field causes the Postcode box to slide out of view. The bounding boxes cannot be altered, the font size is fixed and you cannot click anywhere but the form fields so it’s not possible to delete a few extra lines between the boxes to bring the Postcode back.

And don’t get me started on what happens if you use the up-arrow to go up a line in a multi-line form field. You’d be forgiven for thinking it would move the cursor up a line? But no. Let’s jump the cursor to the form field on the previous page? Yes. The other arrow keys all move around the form field itself in the usual, expected manner. But not the up key. No, that would be too logical.

Word reached the end of its useful life the day they decided to add features for the sake of making a new product hit the shelves instead of for some underlying business need of the userbase. That was back in 2001 and it’s never recovered.