Dauntless Under Sail

It’s Friday.  I wonder what we’ll be talking about at our Friday Night Gathering this evening.  Last week one of the topics was navigation. From the vastness of the oceans to the downside of GPS to the skills involved in dead reckoning – we covered the waterfront you might say.  All very interesting, but I never did want to be a sailor when I grew up.

It’s not that I get seasick.  I don’t.  I’ve ‘sailed through’ (you might say) a storm on the Bay of Biscay when the crew were lashed to the freighter’s deck while performing their duties.  No queasiness detected – but a lot of angst.  It’s the vastness of it all without any landmarks that I find difficult.  I really like landmarks.

I’ve been thinking about that since the computer guru chased Mrs. Crouch out of my keyboard yesterday.  Everything is back to smooth sailing (you might say) with respect to the typing part.  But nothing, beginning with my ‘desktop,’ looks the same.  Nothing.  Things are smaller; icons aren’t where they belong; whatchamacallits are completely gone (and if I knew what they were properly named, I might be able to get help in finding them but…) Without familiar landmarks I am well and truly at sea.

Cape D – A Familiar Landmark

Past experience has taught me that I will eventually get through this.  It will probably be on a need to know basis – sort of ‘steady as she goes’.  The first thing this morning was finding a way to put my email program back to legible.  I don’t know how it had morphed into two-point font size and, frankly, I didn’t care.  But I did resent the ten or fifteen minutes it took me to flail around and fix it.  Learning the ropes all over again (you might say.)

Once I get the familiar landmarks back where they ought to be, I think I’ll be fine… as long as my screen doesn’t go black and the world doesn’t turn out to be flat.