Thursday, 19 October 2023

Some irritating repeated mistakes

 


I’ve done this so often I can’t believe it. I work on a text and make it pretty perfect.  I’m talking here about something quite short – maybe an article for the online magazine I work for or even some technical document about a course I’m building. So, I write the email to the person I’m writing for and attach the document  - except I attach it in this form rather  than the perfected one I have on screen because I’ve forgotten to save it first. So it looks like the above, rather than what you’re reading now.

Similar to this and even more irritating is that occasionally when I go to save a document “as” my computer changes the name of the document to something that I’ve already got in my folder. Well, it’ not just my computes; I have this habit of hovering my mouse over the file list. If I’m not careful I give it the okay to replace the file. I did that twice this morning and have now had to create new files from scratch. Fortunately they were relatively short.   And thank goodness that as well as saving everything in two different places we back our work up to a remote server at least once a week .In this case it was quicker to rewrite, though,  than go through the rigmarole of downloading.

And then there’s my mouse. It mainly works very well, but one of the buttons is sticking so I keep doing things twice – opening emails, opening web pages, inserting lines into spread sheets. And it often immediately undoes what I’ve just done, for example changing the layout on my Blogger site, confirming that I meant to upload, or even closing a document.

Oh the joys of being a writer! Still, I guess these are trivial really compared what might be happening in an office, a classroom or on the shop floor.          

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