It’s true, hating Microsoft Word is kind of like hating your toaster, it’s so ubiquitous. But I’m so tired of it trying to second-guess me, an intelligent woman with a college degree, by making its own changes, none of which I was after in the first place and all of which require a Ph.D. in sub-particle C++ to change it back to the way you wanted it in the first place.

I remember the glory days of MS-Word: Version 5.1 for the Macintosh. Ahhhh, memories. It allowed you to move paragraphs around but didn’t automatically take over your document. It was small and sleek, like my neighbors’ Burmese cats. It helped you when you wanted it to and left you alone the rest of the time. Plus, it ran like a demon on my Powerbook Duo 2300c.

Dad laughed at me once when I said I’d be happy running Word 5.1 for the rest of my life. Who’s laughing now? I’ll tell you: Bill Gates, and he’s laughing all the way to his underground 10-car garage.

Personally, I’d be happy if the only “feature” they kept on the next version was the one that changes “teh” to “the”. Of course, I won’t be able to purposely misspell that word until I paste it into SimpleText for HTML coding.

And when it’s not capitalizing letters that you didn’t want capitalized or changing *this* into this or turning your emoticon into an actual right-side-up smiley face, that damn paperclip pops up and insinuates that you don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re doing, that it’s smarter than you ever possibly could be and you’d be better off by just going away and letting it finish the job for you, thank you very much.

Wirecutters, anyone?

And don’t even get me _started_ on the grammar check, which underlined the entire above paragraph in green, suggesting that it is a long sentence but offering no suggestions as to how it could be improved. When did my seventh-grade English teacher get a QA job up in Redmond?

Apparently the MS engineers aren’t satisfied with their jillions of dollars worth of stock options, but prefer to increase their personal satisfaction by making you “ignore” anything they believe is an error again and again and again, which is really starting to have an effect on my internal confidence that my writing is un-ignorable.

In the interest of truth-in-advertising, I think we should start a petition to change the name of the program from Microsoft Word to Microsoft Turing. Who’s with me here? To the barricades!