Tackling My Computer Poem by Ernestine Northover

Exchanging my days of quill and ink,
To a computer is a must I think,
The favourite of the current age,
Is just the thing I need, I guage.

A modem, printer and scanner will do,
A camera, mouse and speakers too,
With all these marvellous machines,
Life would be effortless, it seems.

Well.....Switching on is bad enough,
One needs to be a computer buff,
It's questions, questions, all the way,
Call 'help' they say, but 'help' won't play.

It takes months to learn all the technical moves,
Ages to slot things within the right grooves,
Once you've accomplished a single great feat,
Remembering how you got there, in the first place, is no treat.

My memory is not as good as this robot,
In fact it makes me look a very real 'dull clot',
One false move and everything becomes a disaster,
However can one end up feeling the master.

I never had problems with my old quill and ink,
Whatever we wrote, we relied on our 'quink', *
Everything stable, everything calm,
Everything tackled with no kind of alarm.

No stress, no anger, no frustration, no curses,
One simple poised instrument doing the 'verses',
My pen who never argued with me,
Would do the job handsomely for no extra fee.

Is this machine a friend or a foe,
I don't think I will ever know,
But I won't give in though, to it's power,
I won't be bullied and I won't cower.

I will achieve and I'll win the day,
A computer 'buff' is here to stay,
But my quill and my ink stay by my side,
In case on my robot my way is 'denied'.

Ernestine Northover