Chapter 13 - Father Oregano waxes philosophical about American saints and the Jamaican Bobsled Team

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete

And at long last, it would be great to have another American saint. Of the 10,000 saints venerated in the Roman Catholic Church, fewer than a dozen were from the United States.

Whenever Father Oregano thought about this anomaly, the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team came to mind.

For as there was not enough snow in Jamaica to favor sledding champions, in America there was way too much adoration of filthy lucre - 'the devil's dung' - to foster sainthood.

Hell, in the USA even local cafes and pizzerias were quoted on the stock market and generated bigger revenues than the GNPs of most 3rd world countries.

In any case... If the identity of this eventual benefactor and future saint was still a question mark, his demonic counterpart had a name and a rap sheet as thick as an encyclopedia:

the driver of the offending Toyota, a certain Hilario Baltazar, had stolen the vehicle and at the time of the accident had been even more wasted on drugs than Del. Pulled out of the wreck more shaken than battered, no doubt thanks to the simultaneous inflation of twenty airbags, he was promptly arrested and - for the fifth time - released without bail, with his trial scheduled for whenever he decided to come back from Quetzaltenango, a hidden city in the hidden western highlands of spectacularly beautiful Guatemala.

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Chapter 15 - It gets real. Juula, an Estonian girl visits Del at the ICU - Text Editing will soon take a quantum leap forward

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Del came back to his senses chastising himself. Lucidity, lucidity at all costs! Machines don't beg doctors to kill patients! Lucidity, damn it!!! How is lucidity obtained when in a coma? he wondered. And as always, because of his experience, the answer came instantaneously: prayer. He mumbled a Rosary. And in the middle of a Glory Be, out of the blue but with poignant clarity, he remembered a moment well after he had been banished from the keyboards, but shortly before the 'additives' - the damned drugs - had lost their magic. He had met a marvelous Estonian girl, marvelous because she was so pure and clean and straight and unsullied by drugs or cynicism or attitudes. Juula was fresh and had honest twinkles in her eyes. Del had been entranced. But after all the bad living he'd been through (with the worst yet to come) for all he was bedazzled, he had refrained from courting her because for the first time in his l...

Chapter 18 - Juula promises to get a "new and improved" DEL back on phones and tablets

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Good morning, Del! Ready for the big day?" "Sure, what do you have in mind?" "A tour... to a place you've often seen but never noticed." "I like it already. Where?" "A page in MS Word." "Eh? Microsoft Word? I must've done two-thirds of all my work there - even starting before Windows. If there's one place that holds no mysteries for me!" "So you might think, my sweet bundle of mashed-up bones, so you might think!" "Okay, I believe you, number one because I have to and number two because I want to. But may I ask why?" "Yes, of course. You feel that you were unjustly removed from the telephones and tablets of the world, correct?" "Well, I can't say 'unjustly' - there wasn't any room for two deletion buttons, so they left the big guy - they left Backspace... but all right, yes, it hurts." "What if I told you I could...

Chapter 1 - From Keyboard Reject to Action Hero

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Once upon a half-life ago, there was a guy called Del. That was his nickname, short for Delete. And he was a reliable, hard-working key on most of the world's computers. A straight-forward and regular sort of guy, he was never more prominent than any of the letters he had been charged to kill, no fatter than an 'i', no skinnier than a capital 'W' - unlike Backspace who was super-sized and flaunted a Nike-style arrow pointing hard-left ←. Some hardware companies, like Lord Macintosh, had refused Del right from the get-go, preferring to farm out his tasks to a combination of other workers like 'Function-Delete,' with 'Delete' on Sir Mac actually being Backspace ←. But then one day, for Del - the original Del - things took a bad turn, real bad! And it happened at the speed of a toilet flush vortex! Millions upon BILLIONS of small handheld flatscreen devices suddenly began to spill from the heavens - the 'STPs' - smartph...

AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

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