Some things never change

Eleven years ago, in a flash of inspiration and disgust, I hammered out a series of essays that ended up becoming the Ed Norton Engineering Society (ENES), a mailing list among friends at first (still going strong), and then four years ago morphing into this blog. The very first "essay" was actually an email rant, written in a rage over losing an hour's worth of work in Word (probably Word 2000 - there have been four versions since then, I am currently using Word 2010). Here is the opening paragraph of that diatribe:

After just spending an hour typing up a work document and then losing it because Word went into a loop and never came back and I ended up having to kill it, I figured out how computers increase productivity. If I had been allowed to finish the document (and in fact, the ironic thing was I really was almost finished with the SOB), what would have happened? I would have emailed it to my team, they (at least some of them) would have been motivated to read it and respond, I would have had to read their responses and reply, all of which would have resulted in the adoption of my proposal in the end, anyway, since no one else knows about private enterprise numbers, OIDs, and their organization within directories, and no one else will probably ever look at my code. Through the wisdom of Microsoft's patented Unnecessary Industriousness Detection and Instant Obliteration Technology (U-IDIOT(tm)), my co-workers and I were spared that extra work. I can now see how computers do, indeed, increase productivity.

This morning, while working on a paper for school, about an hour in I couldn't save it any more. Any attempt at saving would bring up the Save As dialog, but no matter what I named the document, no matter where I tried to save it, it wouldn't save. So I opened a new doc in Word, copied and pasted my work over and...it wouldn't save there, either! I ended up having to save it in Wordpad as an RTF file (so I wouldn't lose all my formatting) and then kill Word (which still wouldn't save either document) and then re-open the Word document, which was missing about 20 minutes of work, and copy and paste back from the Wordpad and then clean things up. And now it saves just fine again. WTF?

Doing some research I hit a post on the Microsoft site pointing to a KnowledgeBase article telling me to delete a key in the registry. Are you freaking kidding me? This is your answer? This is the answer you'd give my mother?

One of the premises of ENES is that all software is crap, all the way down, that it can never become not crap, and that we shouldn't expect it to. And eleven years and four versions of Word later, I see that indeed, Word continues to be crappy, in the same "Here, let me eat all that work and lose it for you" way. Unbelievable. And shame on me for continuing to use it. But then, any alternative wouldn't be any better ("Better the devil you know," etc.)

Grrr...