By Jean Wilson
I had a friend come over last night after supper, asking if I would take his flash drive and copy it to a CD. “Sure,” I said, “it’ll be easy, no problem, but I must get to bed early; I’m going to have to leave at 4:30 am for a conference.” I never thought about asking for a fee, as he is a good neighbor. He needed it to send in to a contest, and nothing else would be accepted.
How simple, I thought, as I took his flash drive inserted it into the hard-to-find hole in the tower. Right side of the flash drive in, I found it had more than the book he’d written, on it. After going to My Computer and searching through the D, F, and E drives, I found which represented the flash drive, and finally erased all the other stuff on it. Then I attempted to copy to the disk he’d given me, but got repeated pop-up screens saying it could not open the disk’s drive. Stumped, I punched the “Eject” button to remove the disk. It was then, I discovered he’d given me a DVD disk; not a CD disk.
Well, we thought that should not make any difference – right?
Wrong!
I struggled for another 40 minutes to get it to write or “burn” to his DVD. Finally giving up, I tried to remove it only to realize it was stuck in there for good! After more struggling, I turned off the entire computer system and rebooted it back up. Voilla! The DVD finally popped right out. I took one of my old CD’s out of my desk, inserted it for his book, but lo and behold, it was full. So that was another writing back to my hard drive so I would have a clear, clean CD for him to submit – I had no other to spare! Then, I hit the “Send to” button so it would “burn” to the CD, from the copied book in My Documents, where I’d safely tucked it first. At last, we had the job done.
Then he timidly announced, “Would you paginate my book?” – he didn’t have it numbered. That was another minute or two, going to the right drive to find the copied book…completed, I mumbled that I’d have to quit and get to bed. He was very grateful of course, but I swore to myself after he left and listened to my husband ask me if I had been stupid in doing the job for him.
Climbing into bed, I wondered how many writers there are, who don’t have the knowledge but just stumble around on the computer to learn what has to be done, like me, or just go to the neighbors’ house to get the job done? Aren’t we writers tough? We never give up!
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