...are of the devil.

You've probably never heard of them before tonight. Neither had I until I accidentally activated them. I was less than an hour away from finishing up on my Assembly Minutes job when it happened. I was holding down the shift key while listening to the session and trying to decide how to begin the next sentence. Suddenly a box popped up on the screen telling me that by holding the shift key down for 8 seconds (ooooooh, I tapped into the secret formula) I had activated the filterkeys. If I wanted to keep them on I could click "Okay" and if I wanted to turn them off I could click "Cancel." Sounds easy enough. I tried "cancel" but it was too late. I have no idea what filterkeys are or why anybody would ever intentionally activate them. All it means is that you can't place the cursor in any specific location on the page, you just highlight a whole bunch of text that you didn't mean to highlight. It also means you can't use simple symbols such as a numbers or even a period--it uses the "greater than" symbol instead. This makes it quite difficult to e-mail your computer tech brother to beg for help since you can't type DOT-com. (NO PERIODS!!! How dumb is that?!) Ah, yes--and this doesn't just effect the Word document you're working on, it screws up your ENTIRE SYSTEM. I worked for 40 minutes scrolling through every menu and settings box I could find and clicking and unclicking on everything that said anything about filterkeys. NOTHING WORKS. I was finally getting desperate. I had e-mailed Jon, but it was way too late to call. I couldn't fix the problem on my own and NOTHING on James's laptop (which I was using) was working right because of the wretched filterkeys. I knew I either had to fix the problem or I'd have to fess up to him what I'd done. That wasn't an option (never until I'm well beyond the point of desperation!), so I brainstormed some more. I finally thought to Google "filterkeys." Ha! You wouldn't believe the number of people who have accidentally activated their filterkeys and become rather irate about it. I was sooooo happy to have found them. Come to find out--after spending 40 minutes trying to do things that make SENSE (like finding the filterkeys options and clicking the box that says "Shut the dumb things off, whatever they are")--all you have to do to get things back to normal is press both shift keys at the same time. ?!?!?! Like THAT makes sense!!! Who makes up stuff like that, anyway?! Why would some smart computer person come up with THAT instead of just making the "turn 'em off" option work?! The ONLY possible motivation must've been some sort of sadistic humor. It's just wrong, I tell you.

Just for kicks, you should type up a Word document and make sure you've got a decent amount of important information in it, then hold down your shift key for 8 seconds. Try to function that way for a few minutes. The panic becomes much more intense if you can imagine yourself being on James Horne's computer and unable to fix the problem and knowing that, eventually, he's going to find out what you've done. And you still have to live with him after that. HA! (He'll love this "make him out to be a monster" stuff! Maybe that's why I do it...) :-)

~whew~ I pushed both shifts. I finished the session up. I am DONE. Done with Assembly Minutes, done blogging, and FOREVER DONE with filterkeys.