Xone of Contention

I Lemon Edsel struggled with the program, but it just wouldn't jell. The problem really was in the software, which was unusually unintelligible. How could he make I it seem easy and user-friendly, when its programmers had evidently labored decades to make it difficult and hostile? This was of course how he earned his living: designing software to make other software seem nice. But in this case he needed to tweak a default in the computer operating system, and access to the key level was barred. That was the fundamental bone of contention. "Damn you, Macrohard," he swore softly. "Just once, couldn't you give a person a break? I'm not trying to steal Doors from you, just to put a special function on the keypad 'Enter' key so Grundy Golem can work independent of the mouse. There are folk who don't like being chained to the mouse, you know; this isn't Dizzy World. Would it hurt you so bad to let someone have it his own way for a change?" But of course he knew the answer: yes, it would truly pain the company to let a user ever have it his own way. Macrohard never wanted anyone to forget for half an instant exactly who was the master, and who was the least important person in the universe. It couldn't stop third party programmers like Edsel from trying to alleviate things, but it could and did make sure that they were unable to make any significant improvements. So the bone became a whole zone of contention. There had to be a way around this block. He had all the rest of it figured outif he could just use this one key. If he could only get in there to edefine it. Without Macrohard catching on. He almost thought he had a glimmer of a way, but he couldn't quite grasp it. He was up against a deadline, and this one aspect balked him maddeningly. This wasn't like his problem with the printer, which Doors refused to allow to use its two paper trays; both had to have paper, but only one could be drawn from, so that he could not have one tray feeding paper while he refilled the other, cycling through without delaying his work. That had been a real aggravation when he had changed to Doors: its deliberate crippling of the useful features of his printer that he had always I used before. But what could he do? Doors had become just about the only game in town, and it slammed shut on any fingers it chose. He had survived that aggravation, but he had not been under a deadline then. Maybe if he took a break, got his mind off it for an hour, the way would come to him. Sometimes it was like that: you had to take the pressure off the gate before you could unlatch it. He remembered his frustration the first time he needed to format a floppy disk, and Doors didn't even list formatting as an option. Their Help feature did tell where to find it, but neglected to clarify that a right mouse click was necessary instead of the left one, to get the proper menu. Macrohard was a genius at providing the necessary function, but effectively disabling it by the selective omission of a key detail, so that most users could not get the benefit of it. Truly fine sadism. So he had wasted precious time before finally finding it by chance. That was too often the only way, as with evolution: time and chance. And that could be wearing on the psyche. While the anonymous Doors programmers surely laughed their nerdly heads off. They evidently loved making working folk waste time, energy, and patience. Edsel got up and walked to the garage. There was his pride: the Lemon motorcycle. He had had it for years, and it was a great old machine. Just a little off its feed right now, but some tinkering with the carburetor should fix that. He laid out his tools and got to work. He always felt better when with his fine machine. The nerviest thing heAnthony, Piers is the author of 'Xone of Contention', published 2000 under ISBN 9780812555233 and ISBN 0812555236.