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My first ever word processor was MacWrite. Running on a single floppy drive Mac with 128k of RAM it worked rather well, as far as I recall. There may have been an issue with large documents, I can't really remember, but it did work. And I could draw with MacDraw or paint with MacPaint and I could copy the pictures and paste them into the MacWrite document, just where I needed them to be. Brilliant! She was a bit plain, but brilliant, like a girlie swot at school, a blue stocking girl with NHS glasses. The second word processor I used was Writenow. Now she was a cute little thing, lithe and responsive, a sexy petite dynamo of a girl that preferred to party than to study, but none the less would pass every exam with an A grade. And what's more no one begrudged this ability because she was just so cool. I could also paste directly where I wanted a picture to go, she was quite happy to co-operate and she took up only a few hundred kilobytes of precious disk space - even though I had upgraded to a “Fat Mac” with 512K of RAM and a 20Mb SCSI hard disk I still had to conserve that expensive commodity.

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The third word processor I used was Word from a company called Microsoft. I can remember thinking “Micro-Soft, neat name, wonder if they’ll make it big?” Hmmm…Anyway I’ve used Word for 10 or more years, on Apple Macs that I have bought and Windows PCs that have been foisted on me by various companies that I have worked for and the relationship has always been tempestuous. Word is a big bloated fat girl, she’s not as smart as she thinks she is, and she’s ugly too. My heart sinks every time I have to create a report or a market analysis document for a customer. I just know there are going to be arguments.

Because she’s so fat, she’s slow – often unable to keep pace with my fingers. So she does things out of spite, like when I type RAM she will automatically change it to Ram so I have to go back and re-type. And she tries to second guess what I want to do, invariably incorrectly – and when I ask for help I get this patronizing “fun” animated cartoon Mac that just really pisses me off. But it’s when I try to really work her hard that she becomes truly a pain. Once she realizes that I am going to paste a number of pictures into her, oh boy does the fun start. Any parent with a truculent teenage daughter will have experienced that sinking feeling as you, once again, square up to each other in a contest of wills in the Friday night/Saturday night “What time to be home” game show. Sure, the first picture will go in OK, the second one also is generally fine, but that’s her patience gone. Any more than that and she’ll try to take the picture and put it somewhere else – like at the top of the page, in the header. So I drag the picture back down to where I want it, and she’ll take it away again, back to the top of the page. Oh, Writenow, where are you? So I drag it back again, and she snatches it away again like the spoilt child she is. So I try again, this time she’ll just hide the picture and won’t tell me where she’s put it, no matter how hard I look. I can shout and rant and rave, but it’ll do no good, I just have to paste it in again. And maybe this time I’ll succeed getting my way with the diagram nestled next to the explanatory text. Then she’ll stamp her foot and unexpectedly quit – which is nonsense of course because, much to her annoyance, that’s exactly what I expect her to do.

But whatever I do, I won’t win. Because, just when I think it’s all complete, done, finished and ready to handover to my customer, in a sneaky hissy fit she’ll have converted another picture into an empty box with a big red “X” in it. At this point I discover that staplers do not generally survive the 600mph impact of hitting a wall, the result of it being hurled across the room as I lose my temper. I then feel full of remorse as I tearfully try to put the stapler back together again. Word is so spiteful that she even drags innocent objects in to the argument.

I then have to go to her sister, Powerpoint, and re-copy the diagram and re-paste back into Word it to get rid of the big red “X”, arguing and fighting with Word all they way, knowing that ultimately this is futile because when I hand the document over to the Windows-based customer, some of the pictures that I so lovingly crafted won’t print at all. So Word is like a stroppy teenager, resentful at being fat and hogging so much disk space but she just can’t stop gobbling it up, resentful because she isn’t so smart after all, jealous of my past relationships with other word processors that I’ve had…I just can’t wait for her to grow up.