By Meghan McKellick

Poland Regional High School

My scroll bar is missing. I don’t know where it went. This has seriously turned into an issue with me. Every time that I use this computer, I hope that maybe it has come back. Much to my dismay, whenever I turn it on, the scroll bar is still not there! One finds it very difficult to read or edit anything when there is no scroll bar. I feel helpless without it. I’m dependant. It’s like a drug. Ok, so maybe it’s not that serious but you try doing anything computer-related without a scroll bar!

“Just arrow down!” you might say to me with a look of annoyance. Well, you think you’re so smart? It won’t arrow down! The only thing I’m allowed to do is type and read the first half of my paper. Luckily enough I can still see the top half as of right now.

The scroll bar is not the only issue that I have with computers. Tell me if this sounds familiar: You’re typing a long, drawn-out, seven-page paper for English class. It’s due next period and you just finished. You go to the top of the page and begin proofreading in order to avoid getting it passed back with nasty remarks on the side about how you should know by now how to spell -‘the’. As you read along you notice a few spelling errors and you go to fix them. What happens? As you type your corrections, the words on the page continue erasing and disappearing from sight! You don’t know what to do; you have no rough draft and with every push of a key your hard work is dissolving somewhere into computer land.

Pop quiz! What do you do to fix this? Retype the whole paper from memory in two minutes? Wrong! You push the -‘insert’ button on your keyboard. I fixed your problem, worship me. Really though, I didn’t know there was even an -‘insert’ button on the keyboard. Nevertheless, one of my peers graciously informed me of its existence and now I feel that my life is complete.

One more thing about computers, well this is actually directed toward -‘Word’ more than the actual computer. If you’re going to invent a program that catches misspelled words, you should have all of the possible corrections available in the word bank. That little red squiggle line is so aggravating. It really doesn’t serve a purpose other than to make me mad. For instance, every time I write anything, I put my name in the upper right hand corner like a good student, and every time the computer tells me that I spelled it wrong. It’s not really that big of a deal, it’s just always there. It never goes away. It stares at me in all its red squiggly-ness telling me that I’m stupid and don’t know how to spell. Well take this computer: supercalifragilisticexpealidocious. Go ahead and try to find a correction for that one!