The Blue Spinning Doughnut, or Office 2007!

I remember the days of Wordstar on DOS 2.01. WYZIWYG was probably a children's character on "Watch With Mother", GUI was something on the bottom of your shoe, and a mouse new where it should hide. Excel was something to be done at school, Microsoft Mutliplan and later, Lotus 1-2-3 were serious applications for number jugglers. 

On the word processor front, the Wordstar guru knew his way around the keyboard (rather like programming a Sinclair ZX81 without murdering the nerve endings in your fingers), committing a myriad of key combinations to memory to be recalled at a moments notice in the quest to complete a document and finally print it out on a 9-pin dot matrix printer. It was all so innocent, there was a certain pleasure to be had in seeing what the final document would look like (Print Preview also was something to be dreamt about, and would probably be an invention of Gerry Anderson's), and saving trees wasn't even on the guilt agenda. 

Over the years things got better, the wonderful people at Xerox created a GUI, a mouse was something different, and for old farts like me, keyboard combinations were still supported ;-) Jump forward a decade or more, and several versions of Microsoft Office PRODUCTIVITY tools and I find myself thrust into the world of airy glass GUIs (which require lots of memory to allow me to partly see other applications under those I am currently using (looking for a good reason here and happy to be educated further ;-), VISTA OS (I recall something to do with fast snack foods like Pot Noodle - forgive me I digress) and Office 2007, the latest PRODUCTIVITY suite, which I met with some misgivings. 

To tell you the truth (which is how all good lies start) I was having a great time with Office 2003, but with a new notebook (I killed the last one, let's leave it at that) I let this new product introduce its way into my life (but without realizing how much impact it would have on me). 

Several months on, after the horror of not understanding where all my menu options had gone, my brain-committed key combinations had mucked up the yin and yang of my daily keyboard symphony (never was a mouse man really), I am horrified by how unstable the whole suite (not just one application) is. 

Office 2007 is very informative, especially when it tells you that the application (and the work you had been feverishly trying to complete) has stopped responding, but then inevitably, after watching the "spinning blue doughnut" (my euphemism for the sadly replaced hour glass symbol) energetically trying to divert my attention away from the meltdown that is happening between VISTA and Office. 

Thank God for AutoRecover, that's all I can say. Invariably I am asked if I want to restart the application, and then go and have a coffee as it spends ages re-kranking up the application (again with the proverbial blue spinning doughnut). 

Which finally brings me to my point; if Microsoft can't fix the problems with Office 2007, why not work on creating a more interesting diversion than the blue spinning doughnut, which I am sure is laughing at me whenever it appears. 

As a male I could probably come up with some "blue" suggestions, but hey something different would be good. Honestly, I am thinking of recording how much time I see this little blue devil appear, probably more time than I spend with my family, and certainly more time than doing anything productive. 

If you watch this little blue spinning, laughing, iconic entertainer long enough, it begins to hypnotize you (probably to prepare you for the next Office 13 Service Pack 22 Trillion perhaps??) Or, maybe, in conclusion, I am really a grumpy old man? Don't answer that one!! ;-)