joy?

Today, I have no feeling of joy. Usually, I look forward to my time at Cowork, at my desk, working on editing my "completed" novel, or writing new material on one I have on the go. But not today.

For one thing, I have a few people who owe me money, and I really hate to ask for it. But the amounts are quite substantial, and I could certainly use it right now.

But that's not the main thing. What is really bothering me is this computer. Have I mentioned it before? It's a Microsoft product called "Surface" and is the worst piece of junk I've ever worked on. It totally has a mind of its own. Sometimes, that's just irritating, and I can rein it in and do what I wanted it to do in the first place--write my novel, or compose an email, etc.--before it took off in another direction altogether. This time it's more serious, and is really making me wonder if I shouldn't just quit the whole idea of creative writing. I don't love it anymore. Not on this contraption.

What happened? Recently I paid an editor about $1600 for an evaluation. So, of course, I took her comments on the document very seriously. I don't hand over $1600 for nothing, you know. So, since about last November (about three months ago) I've been editing and rewriting the novel I had considered to be finished. I'm very grateful to Karen Autio for all her work.

So now: Surface has decided that all my edits should be written in red--the parts I'd deleted are in red, but with strikethroughs. And I can't delete anything at all. It's locked in.

Sure, I can get someone to come and help me get rid of it all, but why should I have to do that? What on earth made the damn thing do that? I didn't have the cursor where it didn't belong. I didn't click on anything other than the keys I needed to type my edits.

OH LOOK! It's about to do it again! I just got a "heads up" notice that it's going to give me a whole lot of updates I didn't ask for and don't need and don't want. But this is Microsoft, and I apparently don't own the piece of junk I bought at Best Buy in October 2015.  (It had to be in the shop for repairs FOUR times before April 2016. Four times in six months.) DON'T BUY A SURFACE COMPUTER!