I should really be writing right now, but I’m so frustrated. In fact, I’m beyond frustrated. I don’t think there’s a word to describe how frustrated I am right now, although a long string of four-letter ones would probably get the point across. But I’ll spare you from that.

You see, my computer didn’t come with Microsoft Word. It wasn’t really a big deal to me when I got it, because WordPerfect suited my light word processing needs just fine then. But when I started writing, I had to turn assignments in in Word format. WordPerfect can save in .doc format, but sometimes it screws up the formatting. So after a while I decided it was time to get MS Word.

Back then I had a little money to spare, but I was trying to get by as cheaply as possible. So I searched online for the best deal I could find on MS Word. Everything was in the hundreds of dollars, and I thought that surely I could get by cheaper than that. I finally found an OEM copy of Word 2000 for around $30, so I jumped on it.

The CD-ROM came in the mail a few days later, and I set about installing it. Or I tried to. I kept getting errors, and after several hours of frustration for me and strange noises from my CD-ROM drive, I gave up. I called customer service, and they said they would ship me another one out right away. They did, and it arrived a few days afterward.

I popped that one in the drive, only to hear similar sounds. Not good. But I wrestled with it, hoping I could just get it on my computer and get on with my life. I finally managed to install the most basic requirements of the program and get it to work. That was a task in itself, but it made me happy.

My MS Word has always been a little buggy, but I managed to get my work done without incident for the most part. But then last week, it just ceased to work like it should. I could no longer open a file from the menu, and composing and editing began using way too much memory and processing power. When it became virtually impossible to do anything with it, I began looking for alternatives.

I tried WordPerfect again, and it keeps screwing up my formatting even if I start over from scratch. I’ve also tried Zoho (an online word processing program that saves in .doc format), but it’s driving me nuts too. I’m considering trying Google Docs, and seeing how much I despise the big G lately, that should tell you just how desperate I am.

I would love to buy Word 2007 and be done with it, but that’s simply not possible right now. If I had known what a pain this was going to be, I would have invested in a newer version in the first place. I guess I’ll know next time, huh?