Word Processor Versus Whine Professor

This took place in an antiquarian bookstore back in the mid-1980s. I was the clerk. The owner took a daring step into the new age of technology and bought a word processor. (Everyone else was buying personal computers.) I, of course, was tasked with figuring out how to use the d***ed thing.

I was trying to make it save a correspondence template and cussing when it dumped my text yet again, under the regard of an infrequent customer, a professor at the local state college.

He told me the multiple virtues of a computer over the word processor — as if I had any say in the decision.

Me: “I can’t afford one on what I am making.”

Customer: “Just whine until [Boss] does it. That’s how I make my wife do what I want.”

Which made me grateful that I wasn’t married to him!