RIVER CITY JOURNAL: COMPUTER BITES EDITOR; LARGE CHUNK MISSING

Make that a chunk of column, not the editor, who only lost his patience and a large portion of his good nature.

When my computer is good

It is very, very good.

It helps me every day.

But when my computer is bad,

It might as well be oatmeal.

Oh, well, you get the point.

This column was long -- really long -- until the all-powerful and omnipotent computer system decided to burp. Somehow, the computer arbitrarily chose to get what I was working on stuck somewhere in its innards.

The computer whizzes -- of which I most certainly am not one -- said, "No problem." I get really, really worried when the computer whizzes say that.

There is special software to retrieve my stuck stuff, I was patiently told. Software is what computer whizzes call anything complicated about computers. It is code for "He doesn't understand anyway, so let's not bother to explain this. Let's just call it a software problem."

A fairly literate computer person punched all the buttons to make my lost stuff find its way back into my computer. By golly, the software found my stuff OK. But there was a small, rather consequential problem.

After finding my stuff, the computer -- or its software or maybe Beelzebub himself -- decided to let just a part of my stuff return to my world. The rest, I suppose, was kept as a sacrificial offering for putting the computer through so much trouble.

I really like computers. I really, really do. I say this loudly several times each day, because I think computers might have ears, and if they hear me saying nice things about them, they will be nice in return. Most of the time it works.

In fact, computers do amazing jobs that would take us mere mortals hours and hours to do. Computers make my job easier. They make my life easier.

Until they burp. I know. "Burp" isn't exactly from the textbook lingo of computers, but right now I can't think of the high-tech word I'm looking for.

I could use the built-in spell checker or the online thesaurus, but I've learned that they aren't entirely reliable either. How does the computer know which form of "bear" I am using? Did I mean "bare" instead? And what if it was "Bayer" I really meant.

This, the computer experts tell me, isn't the computer's problem. Rather it is the result of the conglomeration we call English, which has so many words that look alike and are spelled alike but have entirely different meanings. All of which suggests that you can use the absolutely wrong word in this column, but if the wrong word is spelled correctly, the computer thinks that's just fine.

The rest of this column was really, really interesting. It covered a lot of interesting and useful details about computers that would have you sitting on the edge of your chair while the cereal on your spoon spilled onto the table where the cat has jumped in anticipation of your rapt inattention.

But it's gone. All gone. What you have here is a human effort to replace a computer's whimsy.

So far it's Computer 1, Columnist 0. That's the way it is some days.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.