From confusion to laughter

I thought it was appropriate one evening last week that when I got home from work the Terminator 3 movie, Rise of the Machines, was on.

It kind of summed up how my day had felt, minus actors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes and an unrelenting T-X killing machine with an endoskeleton, complete with built-in weaponry and a liquid metal exterior.

My day wasn’t quite that bad, but it was confusing.

It started out with the fact that I wasn’t receiving emails that I knew I should be getting. I had chalked it up to the fact that the people had decided not to send me emails, until I finally discovered the email program on my computer wasn’t working the way it was supposed to.

The problem was eventually fixed and I continued on my merry way.

Well, sort of.

I’ve mentioned before that my laptop no longer types the letters D, F, G, H, J, K and L. It’s not a big issue during the day because I use an external keyboard and external monitor. But when I’m out in the field, or at home on the couch, it’s clumsy and cumbersome to drag along my external keyboard from work.

Plus, it doesn’t fit in my laptop case.

My supervisor said I could expense a smaller keyboard to make life more simple between now and the day I eventually get a new laptop. So I did.

I plugged it into my laptop. It didn’t work.

Tried rebooting my laptop. It didn’t work.

Googled why it wouldn’t work. Still got nowhere.

Asked one of our I. T. guys about. He offered a solution but it didn’t pan out.

By now I’m wondering if I have to install software.

It wasn’t until I finally took out the instructions that came with the keyboard that I read about the ON/OFF switch.

It’s amazing how something works 100 per cent better when you actually turn it on.

Just sayin.’

So now I had a functioning keyboard and people were emailing me again. All good?

Who are we kidding? Later in the day I wrote a story and put it through spellcheck. I was baffled to see that spellcheck was stopping at every word, implying that they were spelled incorrectly.

What are the odds?

I mean even when I’m not wear- ing my reading glasses, and even without my external keyboard, I’m apt to spell some words right. But apparently not today. Even more baffling than the fact that spellcheck was stopping on every single word was the fact the words it was suggesting I use to replace each word either had an accent in them or looked like they were some other language.

You think I would have clued in sooner, but nope, it took about 25 minutes and four documents to discover that my spellcheck had defaulted to French. And it took me just as long to get it to default back to English.

The whole day really had a Twilight Zone feel to it, although somewhere between the Rise of the Machines in my office, and the one on my television later that night, there was a rather funny moment.

My youngest son and I were driving home when he played a song from his phone over our car stereo. The song was one I recognized from back in my day, but I couldn’t remember who sang it.

The conversation went like this.

Me: “Who sings this song?” Him: “April Wine.”

Him again. “Do you know who she is?”

Me, and by now I’m laughing: “What did you say?”

Him: “Do you know her?” For the next two minutes the poor kid sat there completely confused as I laughed and laughed uncontrollably, unable to spit out the words to my 15-year-old that April Wine is a band, not a woman.

After I finally was able to tell him, I will say he was more on the ball than I was when trying to figure out why my keyboard didn’t work.

“I see a Facebook post in this,” he told me.

At that moment he was singing my tune.