Write Protect

When was the last time you heard that phrase? Do you even remember what it refers to? For that matter, you might even be too young to remember it at all.

I’ve learned that in the office of landscape architects, the office employees don’t get upgrades a lot. It makes sense. After all, the work of the firm is to draw huge landscape plans and print them off or upload them. They have to spend money on the updates to CAD and Photoshop and have really nice, huge printers. Which means I have had to step back in time and remember how to use Office 2003…and sigh over how little it does compared to what I’m use to. Now I can manage without my arsenal of Excel shortcuts that weren’t created twelve years ago, but you have to laugh at computer towers that still have floppy drives.

Now, of course I am not talking about the floppy drives I used in elementary school with disks that really did flop and DOS commands that made them work. These are the harder disks, so we’re talking middle school now. Carol, the woman who is training me, did purchase a zip drive when I first got here, but she refuses to use it. And since her accounting computer is off the network, if we have to transfer something to my computer she hands me a disk.

Last week she handed me a disk and told me that it might not work – she was having trouble with it. I put it in my tower and pulled up the documents I needed. After I transfer them to my computer, I always delete them from the disk so we know I have them. That’s when the pop-up appeared and told me I couldn’t delete them because the disk was write protected.

Write protected…write protected…that phrase had a hazy feeling about it. Like I knew the answer to the problem, but it was stored nearly two decades back in my mind. The first solution I thought of wasn’t the right one. Then it dawned on me: there’s a switch on the disk itself! I used to switch it all the time when I was backing up the stories I wrote and didn’t wasn’t to loose on my own disks. Sure enough, a flip of the switch got rid of the write protect.

My kids won’t know what a floppy disk is. Some of my siblings probably don’t know. They’ll have limited knowledge of CDs. I’m not sure they’ll ever use a phone with a cord…and certainly not one you have to rotary dial. A TV that isn’t a flat screen? Or HD? And what’s a fax machine? An atlas? In fact, they’ll be born knowing more about technology than I do. And it will change so fast, what was here today will be gone tomorrow.

How fast this 21^st Century changes!