Driven Crazy By A Crab!

My work has been driving me crazy.

For the past week or ten days, my work floundered as I attempted to convert my book manuscript of A Dirty Old Man Goes Bad from a 467-page Word document into a 325-page PDF file for the printer.

No go.

The thing would not convert.

I tried this. I tried that. I revised. I cursed. I prayed. I copied. I pasted.

Nothing worked.

With weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, I labored over this thing but nothing I did made any difference. I consulted my computer guru son Donald and followed his suggestions.

All to no avail.

I pondered reasons why I can’t get this book to the printer?

Perhaps the devil did not want my words of wisdom to reach a needy world of readers anxiously awaiting these autobiographical snippets.

Perhaps the Lord God Almighty did not want my writing to muddy the water for readers headed to His Kingdom.

Perhaps Bill Gates (who I’m convinced personally hates me – although I never did anything to the man) Perhaps Bill Gates hacks into my computer at night and messes up my files.

Or maybe Stephen King, America’s greatest writer, fears my writing will bump him from his spot on the Best Seller List, so he sabotages my work in a fit of petty jealousy. Poor fellow. Must be tough to be the King and see your replacement on the rise.

You know, sometimes when you screw up the same thing again and again, it’s wise to consult an expert.

Donald asked his friend Helen, a graphic artist, to look at my files to see why I’ve floundered. Glancing over my text this morning, she spotted and corrected the problem in just a couple of hours.

It was all the crab’s fault.

You see, my manuscript carries a couple of dozen photos to illustrate the text.

One of these photos is a picture of a crab statue that Donald gave me for my birthday:

.

One of the people at the party snapped this photo on one of those telephones that not only make noise but also take pictures. This FoneyFoto was e-mailed wirelessly from my backyard to the computer in my living room – a distance of 50 yards. And to illustrate A Dirty Old Man Goes Bad, I used this one photo among all the others which had been taken with real cameras.

The crab picture from the FoneyFoto device carries within it a vastly different electronic structure from real photos. Whenever I’d try to convert my manuscript using pdf software, the thing would perk along fine till it came to this snapping crab.

Terrified of the crab’s pinchers, the software would run screaming out of the water leaving all my manuscript pages to soggify into mush and sink beneath the surface.

Helen did something technical to the crab.

Now the conversion program works.

All those hundreds of pages of text I’ve been revising and revising had nothing to do with my problem. Maybe there’s some spiritual lesson I can learn here, maybe instead of beating my head against a firewall fruitlessly, I should have asked for help sooner.

I think I almost remember a Scripture verse that applies:

Come unto me all ye that labor
and are heavy laden,
and I will swack thy crab – or something like that.

Anyhow, my manuscript converted into a pdf file last night.

Printer’s proof pages are on the way.

In another week or ten days the book will be available – please mail my copy to the asylum.