Proof that I'm not such a geek after all . . .

. . . as if proof of such a self-evident proposition were needed:

Proof #1:

After Mary Ellen had spent a lot of time laying out St. Mark's latest 8-page newsletter, I sat down at the computer to tweak it a little. When I finished, I saved the file and attempted to quit the program. At that point an alert box I'd never seen before appeared telling me that files in a queue had not yet been written to drive D:. "Well of course they haven't been written to drive D:," I says to myself, I says, "drive D: is the CD drive and we don't save anything on that drive. We save all our stuff onto C:."

So I told the computer "I don't care about that queue, and can we please now quit this program?" "Sure, Dan," the computer replied, "but I'm obliged to tell you that if you delete the files in that queue, there will be no way to get them back. So, . . . "
"Yes, yes, fine! I don't want them back! Just a moment ago I told you to save the only file I care about. Toss those others, whatever they are, into the fire. Can we please now quit this program?"
"Sure, Dan. It's your life."

Problem is, when I had told the computer to save that file, all it did was put it into the queue waiting to be written onto D: . And when I told it to toss that queue into the fire, . . .

I didn't handle any of this like a true geek. A true geek would have puzzled over that never-before-seen alert box for a moment or two and then he would have investigated and not stopped until he found out what caused it. He also would have found out just what files were in that queue before trashing them. Even a geek wannabe would know enough to at least do a "Save As" on the newsletter before discarding everything in the queue.

Proof #2:

I spent much of Sunday trying unsuccessfully to sync my iPhone. The sync would work fine until it got to a particular file, at which point it would hang. Time after time after time. I eventually decided that the troublesome file was one of my "Teach yourself Italian" lessons. Since Italy is not on the horizon, I decided to just delete that file from the computer. Now the sync got hung up on a different, but similarly named file. My solution: Delete all the Italian files on the computer. And for good measure, delete all the "Teach yourself French" files too. The sync still hung up. Apparently it wasn't the language lessons that were causing the problem after all. More investigation revealed that it was files from iPhone's Voice Memo app that were at fault. Once I told iTunes not to sync Voice Memo, the problem was solved. Of course, now I have a new problem: no Italian lessons and no French lessons. And with a possible trip to Canada coming up this fall, some French lessons could be . . . comment dites-vous? . . . useful.