Suzie’s House 311 : Word War

“Argh! It happened again.” Ben grabbed either side of his head and grimaced.

“Yeah?” Lisa looked up from her legal pad. She was sitting on the other side of the dining room table so she could keep a vigilant eye on the kitchen. Ben didn’t care about when their writing sessions got interrupted, but it drove Lisa batty. With that much thumping around, and the good smells coming out, they’d have to make room for the plates soon.

“Now I have to type it all over again, and I can’t remember what I wrote.”

Reluctantly, Lisa went around the table to see what he was talking about. Toward the bottom of the word processor screen was a bunch of random letters. Something like:

wjat uoi get wjem pme jamd ,pves pver pm tke leu[ad/

“That’s messed up.” Lisa commented without really thinking about it. “How did you manage to write two paragraphs like that?”

“I wasn’t looking at the screen. I was thinking about what I wanted to say.”

She could kind of understand where he was coming from, but it wasn’t like that at all on a legal pad. Though sometimes it got hard to read her own handwriting. She hovered her hands over the keyboard, trying to see if she could figure out how to fix it. “You’d think it would be easier to fix on a computer.”

“Yeah, I know. There should be a button for that.” He got his fingers in under hers to touch the laptop’s mouse pad thingy.

“Isn’t there? Seems like I heard of one, too.” She straightened because bending over like that hurt her back and he was doing stuff anyway.

“Well, then, where is it?” Ben waved at his laptop.

“Maybe under “Format”? Or how about “Edit”? Or if we really get desperate we could try the “Help” menu.”

“Yeah. Like that’s ever any good.” He trampled the suggestion with a wave.

“Well, I don’t know.” Lisa went back to her side of the table with a helpless shrug.

“Wait. You can’t write anything until I figure it out!”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re in the middle of a word war. You’ll get more words than me for sure if I have to stop and fix this first.”

Lisa looked at her legal pad, then his computer, and back, but she didn’t say a word.

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