What a week! Gremlins, more gremlins and plenty ‘o food.
First
So you know how sometimes Microsoft Word just sucks? How there’s a little gremlin that hides between your words, ready to throw everything off by inexplicably typing one word in a different font and not letting it go back to normal? Well. I discovered a new gremlin this week—we’ll call it the “pilotdesktopicon” gremlin.
At press time, Googling “pilotdesktopicon” returned a mere 6 hits, and this post will surely add another. It all started at work, where I was writing about a pilot program. All of a sudden, a small, pixelated image of what looked like a palm pilot showed up in my document.
“What? How odd.” I said out loud, to no one. I deleted it and kept going. But it came back.
Eventually I realized that every time I typed the word “pilot,” an autotext entry popped up and said, “Pilotdesktopicon PRESS [ENTER] TO INSERT.” If I pressed return, lo and behold the stupid little picture would show up.
A little bit of Googling revealed that this has happened to a small handful of other Word users—but than that, I found no real explanation. The IT guy said it’s probably from some palm pilot application that a previous user of my computer had. How odd.
[Note to future "Pilotdesktopicon" Googlers: turn it off by deleting the Pilotdesktopicon entry from your AutoText list under Tools > AutoCorrect > AutoText tab.]
Anyway, let’s play the age-old game of “which of the following useful word processing features does not belong?”:
• Word count
• Spell check
• Grammar check
• Bullets and numbering
• Track changes
• Auto-insert image of palm pilot when user types “pilot”
If you said “spell check”—you’re wrong.
Second
The next gremlin of the week turned out to be a far more malicious one. I don’t think I can actually talk about it here, but it’s sure to be a fun ride, and by “fun” I mean “pain in the goddamn ass—F me.” Gremlins are crafty little fuckers.
Third
There is no Third. You know why? Because this is a short week! It was over before it even started. Happy Thanksgiving!!
4 responses so far ↓
1 michael5000 // Nov 21, 2007 at 11:08 pm
I’ve got Gremlins #3-#3000000 running wild in my digestive tract. Each of them fairly malicious. No Thanksgiving dinner for me.
You’re welcome for the sharing.
2 lenore_happenstance // Nov 22, 2007 at 4:34 am
I was wondering what that was all about! That was one of those little irksome itches I couldn’t scratch.
Mashed potatoes. My only Thanksgiving vice.
3 TimsHead // Nov 22, 2007 at 7:16 am
Ugh. I despise so many little things about Word. Especially that if I go to hit Delete and accidentally graze Help, the stupid little PaperClipDorkThing shows up, and I have to stop working long enough for it to appear and then make it disappear.
Apparently there’s an open source app called Open Office that’s supposed to do everything the MicroSuck one does. Of course, since I’m in a large work network that requires compatibility, I haven’t even taken the time to look at it, but it would be a marvelous day if everyone could throw off the yoke of Word and its related oppressors.
Hey Laura, have a great Thanksgiving!
4 Uncle Joe // Nov 23, 2007 at 4:47 am
Hey ! Back in the 70’s there was AMC car called
a Gremlin!!! It was proabably the first hatchback.
Happy Thanksgiving!