by Justice William W. Bedsworth
It’s painfully difficult at my age to find myself mired in a dysfunctional relationship. But here I am.
Lord knows, I have screwed up some relationships in my life. To quote one of my favorite country songs, “time, tequila, and tenderness” have allowed me to put most of them back together again. Or learn to live with the regret.
But my relationship with my present computer is fraught and irreparable. And vaguely psychotic.
If I’m found face down in a gutter next week, don’t believe it was an accident. Arrest my computer.
My relationships with technology have always been shaky. I was the last kid on the block to learn how to put the chain back on his bicycle when it came off, and skate keys were an absolute mystery to me.1
We didn’t have enough money for a typewriter, so I had to borrow one for my high school papers. Unfortunately, the one I borrowed had elite type instead of pica.2
Elite is much smaller. So while the other kids were writing five hundred words to fill the two pages required by the assignment, I was laboring through eight hundred. And antagonizing my squinting teachers.
The most visible remnant of those days is my keyboard striking technique. Having learned to type on a manual typewriter, I impart a lot of force to my keystrokes. People in neighboring zip codes spend a lot of time trying to figure out what that distant clackety-clack pounding noise is.
Thirty years ago, my youngest child asked her mother one evening if Daddy was mad. Her mother said she didn’t think so and asked why Caitlin thought I might be. Caitlin, having learned to type on a keyboard, said, “Because he’s banging on the computer keys.”
So now I have this fancy-schmancy computer with some kind of whisper touch feature. It types a letter if I so much as breathe in that direction and then ANTICIPATES what I was going to say and finishes my sentence!
Badly.
Like AI attorney “helpers,” it makes up crazy stuff. 3
I tried to type the word “hoping.”
I missed the “o” and my fat, old, right ring finger (in fairness it’s burdened with a big, old ring) hit the neighboring “i” key instead. So my text said “hiping.”
You wanna guess what my brilliant Fancy-Schmanzy X-1200 computer did? Turned it into “hyping,” right? Good guess. ”Hyping” would have been my guess, too.
But you and I aren’t AI. We’re NS.4
The X-1200 flew right past “hyping” and went straight to “hipping.”
Hipping. I looked at my sentence and it said I was hipping to go on vacation in October. Hipping.
What in hell is “hipping?” How would I hip—or hipp—on vacation?
Why would my computer think that’s what I meant. Why would it think I wanted to shift to non-words all of a sudden?
I mean, I know a lot of you read this column expecting eventually to get to the one in which I just completely go walk-about and you’re able to talk to all your friends about the last column I wrote before they institutionalized me.
But my computer doesn’t know that? Does it?
I’ve only had it a short time. I had to give up my trusty-musty bought-back-in-the-days-when-humans-ruled-the-earth pre-retirement computer. This one just beamed up from a jungle in South America5 a few months ago.
During that time I’ve written mostly goofy stuff,6 but I’ve always used real words. This is an important distinction. Say what you will about my word choices, I generally use words immediately recognizable to people who employ American English as their primary means of communication.
Until I started hanging out with my three-year-old grandson, I didn’t realize how important that is. Thorton has taught me that we make a tremendous mistake when we start a question to a witness by saying, “In your own words . . .”
Thor has HIS OWN WORDS. And he uses them with fluency and alacrity. You ask him where his scooter is and he replies immediately. In his own words.
His explanation leaves you with no idea whether it’s in the backyard, in East Pakistan, or he pawned it a week ago. BECAUSE HE USED HIS OWN WORDS!
“My words, Thor; use Grandpa’s words!”
My words, X-1200, use my words!
Hippos might hipp. If I sell you to a hippo—which I would do in a heartbeat right now—you may have occasion to use that “word.” But for the time being, let’s stick to human words. Whattya say?
And whattya say we talk about my levitating cursor while we’re at it? Or are we saving that for our first meeting with a relationship counselor?
My cursor periodically levitates off the screen, leaves the room, and goes to . . . I don’t know, Papeete?
That might be my choice if I had one but I don’t. AND NEITHER SHOULD MY CURSOR.
I’m pretty sure my contract with my new computer guarantees me a cursor at all times. And the cursor can’t be me no matter how much cursing I do.
It’s bad enough when I have to search all over for it, tracing circles on my keypad and begging it to return. But a lot of times it just moves into a different part of my text and hides there like a lion in a corn maze, waiting me for me to type letters that will now be horribly out of place.
I get sentences like, “Now Is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their ully understand my country.” Lovely.
And then there’s the “save” function. Do you know where the X-1200 saves my documents?
No, seriously. That’s not a figure of speech. It’s a question. Does anybody out there know where these things have gone? Because for all the good they’re doing me, they might as well have been saved into somebody’s safe deposit box in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
This is serious dysfunction.
In science, the Anna Karenina Principle7 says that if even one limiting factor of a process is unsuccessful, the whole process will fail. If you consider this column a failure, blame my computer, Anna.
Kelly insisted for years that I couldn’t retire because I couldn’t give up my IT guy. I think about him often when I’m cursing my cursor.
But I don’t think this is an IT problem. I think I somehow got hold of a computer that was meant for Stephen King. This one’s inhabited by the ghost of a dead abacus, which can’t cross over into computing heaven until it drives me stark, staring bonkers.
I don’t need an IT guy, I need a witch doctor. Unfortunately, every time I type “information technology expert” into my search engine my computer turns off.
Helllllp!
BEDS NOTES
William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.