I put away my flip phone and obtained my very first smartphone, a refurbished iPhone 4, in March 2015. I was a latecomer to the party, as the vast majority of people I knew had smartphones by then. I instantly fell in love, and the more features I discovered, the more I adored my phone.

Fast forward to today. I am on my third smartphone, an iPhone 13 mini, and I cannot imagine not having it. I cannot imagine not being able to text, for example. People do not speak on the phone anymore; they text. (That is not entirely true. I voice call my mother much more than I text her, but that makes her more comfortable.) I am addicted to my email and love having it at my fingertips. And I am spoiled enough to loathe the thought of turning on the TV and waiting for the weather forecast rather than just asking Siri, “What is the temperature in Frederick, Maryland?”

I also love being able to take my music MP3s wherever I go (though I wish our cars had Bluetooth so that my phone could pair with their speakers and I could listen to my tunes while I drive) and I adore being able to look at YouTube videos while stuck in a long checkout line at the supermarket.

However, all good things have a down side.

I have mild cerebral palsy (CP) and, due to my age, cannot see my phone screen well without my reading glasses. This means that filling out forms on my phone can be problematic. I realized this back in 2021 when I was trying to register for my second primary COVID-19 vaccination. After I scanned the QR code with which I had been provided, the form came up in tiny letters. Whenever the virtual keyboard appeared, I had to struggle to see each letter before pressing it. The CP makes it nearly impossible to text quickly with both of my thumbs; I must do the hunt-and-peck with my forefinger. (I feel the need to say that this is not the way I type on a regular computer keyboard. I can type at high speed on one of those.)

Still, I cherish my phone.

What kinds of things do you regularly do on your smartphone?

As many of you probably remember, last summer I took an online class on Paul Beverley’s Word macros. May I say that Mr. Beverley is a genius in my opinion? I downloaded and learned so many keyboard shortcuts to make my editing more efficient. And isn’t efficiency something for which we should all strive in our work?

My list of macros resides on the bulletin board above my computer desk. I haven’t counted them, but there are probably about 30 or so. I have a few macros which are especially near and dear to me. Please allow me to gush about them like the geek that I am…

BibleGatewayFetch is extremely helpful in the work I do for my church. The church’s weekly programs always contain an outline of Scripture citations, each of which must be verified. Before I downloaded this macro, I had to remember which book, chapter, and verse were in each citation before pulling up the Bible Gateway website and manually typing them in so that the website would display them. With the BibleGatewayFetch macro, however, I only need to highlight the Bible citation in Word, then press Ctrl+Alt+B. Presto! The verse appears on my screen.

GoogleFetch is another internet macro that I love. If I highlight a word, name, or phrase in a Word document and press Ctrl+Alt+G, Google quickly runs a search on the highlighted word and shows the results. MerriamFetch is similar, except that it searches for a highlighted word in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary and displays its definition. Just today, I used MerriamFetch to find out the definition of “succulent” (as a noun).

There are also macros that replace one word or item with another. NumberToText and TextToNumber are highly useful in the editing of research manuscripts. For example, some authors are not aware of the style rule that one must never begin a sentence with a numeral. If I see a sentence that begins, “2000 years ago…” I can place my cursor on “2000,” press Ctrl+Alt+N, and boom, the phrase changes to “Two thousand years ago…” In order to perform the reverse function, I can also place my cursor on “seven hundred,” press Ctrl+Alt+T, and get “700.”

If you use Word macros, what are a few of your favorites?

Sometimes, when I recall how quickly technology evolves, I feel old.

I am old enough to remember storing my files on 3 ½ -inch disks. I had to buy one in high school for my typing class. (Yes, I was of the first generation that learned to type on a computer instead of a typewriter.) The computers we used were IBM PS2s and the year that I used them, they were new to the school. This was 1989, so we were considered ahead of many other school districts in Maryland.

The following semester, I took a class called Computer Applications, where we worked on Apple IIe machines. Unfortunately, these dinosaurs did not work with the 3 ½- inch disk; instead, they worked with the ancient 5 ¼-inch floppy disks (the kind that, I assume, gave rise to the term “floppy”) and I had to purchase one. I only vaguely remember the primitive word processing program that we were taught to use.

I learned WordPerfect in high school when I was the copy editor of the school newspaper. I loved it. At that time, Windows was in its infancy and Microsoft Word had not yet come out, so WordPerfect was considered the best of the best (at least by me).

Imagine my shock, then, when I arrived as a freshman at my small liberal arts college and found that the computers in its lab did not have WordPerfect, but WordStar. WordStar was clunky and not user-friendly. I hated it and so did the other students. I believe that it was the following year when the college installed WordPerfect on its lab computers—probably by popular request.

It was around the time I graduated college that I began to experiment with the Microsoft Windows products. I basically taught myself MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint at first and took classes and read books later in life to constantly update and refine my skills with them. Nowadays, I am using the standalone version of MS Office 2019. I look back at WordPerfect and the other word processing programs of the past and wonder how I ever managed to write papers on them.

What are some of your computer-related memories?

A few weeks ago, I stated that editors should be readers. Readers, by nature, love libraries.

When my husband and I lived in the Brooklyn area of Baltimore City, we were lucky enough to live within walking distance of a small branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. On Saturday mornings, I would often venture there to check out a Patricia Cornwell (Kay Scarpetta) or Janet Evanovich (Stephanie Plum) novel to read during my light rail train commute. I would also read in the lunch room at work while I ate (yes, I know how rude this sounds, but one must understand that many of my coworkers often spoke with each other in a language that I did not comprehend, so it was more entertaining to follow a murder mystery than to try to decipher said language).

In 2010, we moved to Frederick and going to the library suddenly presented a problem. Of all the libraries in the Frederick County, Maryland system, there are two that are a reasonable distance from our home. One of them is right in the downtown area, and it is absolutely gorgeous. Its two floors are packed with all kinds of books and resources and computers. Oh, how I wish I could visit it regularly. Why can’t I? One must park in a garage to get to it. Parking garages are not my friends. I can never reach the kiosk to get my ticket and must open the car door, making myself look inept. If I manage to get the car close enough to the kiosk, I inevitably bang my driver’s side rear view mirror against the kiosk, giving the mirror a permanent streak of yellow paint. Although the library will validate two hours of parking, it just is not worth the stress that it causes me.

About five or six years ago, a new library opened in the nearby town of Walkersville. I very much wanted to go, so I Google mapped directions to the library and set out. Would you believe that I could not find it? I tried more than once, to no avail. Perhaps I should try again using my GPS this time, although I tend to not trust GPS.

I will, by hook or by crook, start regularly visiting a library again.