Chapter 20 - If it takes you more than one touch to zap a paragraph, you're working too hard.

                 

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete

"Exactly right. The common topography of any text!"

"Now this is where your old keyboard job comes into play. Knowing that there's a pilcrow before and after every paragraph... how does that inescapable fact favor deleting paragraphs? Put on your thinking cap!"

"Hmm... well first you have to select..."

"BZZZZ! Wrong!"

Alarmed, Del quickly corrected himself: "No, no, no... I don't have to select.... but you'd better give me a hint, Juula... or you know what could happen!"

"Okay, here's the hint: it's forward deletion, like what you've always done, but with a twist - a slightly different instruction."

"Okay, a new instruction... We have a paragraph, and like all paragraphs there's a doohickey..."

"A pilcrow!"

"...A pilcrow before and after. No selection allowed." Arnold Schwarzenegger to the rescue!

That Austrian weightlifter - literally - on steroids, dropped on planet earth by his wicked-smart alien masters was definitely onto something with his positronic brain capable of sizing up reality in cheesy 1991 computer zooms. SNAP-SNAP-SNAP: the answer was simplicity itself. 

"This is so easy, it's embarrassing! You instruct the cursor to see what's to the left. In this case a pilcrow. Then the cursor goes back in place and forward deletes right up to and including the next pilcrow it finds. So you unite the pilcrow on the left to the pilcrow on the right and gobble the paragraph in the middle."

"Del, I love you!!!"

Del blanked out. Something deep inside figured that if he was anyway going to die, it was best to bow out after the girl of his dreams had made such a marvelous declaration!

And Del went out so fast that he didn't hear all his life support systems playing a Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti.

But making the rounds to provide extreme unction to the dying, Father Oregano was nearby. And he personally witnessed all those machines - that normally signal a patient's imminent death in jarring cacophonies, now playing the Neapolitan composer's masterpiece.

And such a thing could only be miraculous. And so he scrambled to catch the tail end of that ICU concert on his old Samsung. Done! He would then forward the clip along with a sworn affidavit to the Vatican to bolster the beatification cause of 'Servant of God' Jeff Bezos. Little did he know that final approval had been given to unplug Del. It was only a matter of hours.