Glad for my Mac

The whole Apple thing is almost a religion, and I've tried to avoid being obnoxious about it. Everyone knows the jokes about having a Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness on the doorstep.

But it's difficult, given the agony of doing very ordinary things on a Windows machine. The last gasp of the church's old Windows machine was the 45-minute project downloading eight PowerPoint songs to my flash drive. Then I talked them into a Mac Mini.

I should have learned my lesson, but no. I had to tempt fate. Today I've got my students writing a brief final essay, and I suggested that the ones in the non-computer classes could use their laptops and load their papers onto my flash drive. What a mistake. Ignoring the fact that the simple act of plugging a flash into a Win machine starts a 3-minute installation process, the thing was still a nightmare.

1. Click "Save As"
2. Find the picture of the computer and click that. Then scroll down and find the fairly obscure picture of my flash drive and click that.
3. Computer says the flash drive is empty, which is odd, but perhaps it just means empty of docx files. Type a name for the file and click "save."
4. Computer response: "File not found."

Now this is the point where the Apple user begins to lose his mind. I wasn't searching for anything. I wanted to make a new file. But the computer couldn't find the file that hadn't been made yet.

Maybe I shouldn't blame Windows, though. After several different fruitless tries, we plugged the flash drive into a different USB port and everything worked. Windows could recognize the first port enough to say that something was in there, but not enough to say what it was. Maybe the problem was cheap hardware after all. The whole project only took fifteen minutes.