It's only within the past few years that I finally bought a mouse with a scroll wheel. Laugh if you will, but for me that's a big technological advance. I still don't have a cell phone, let alone an iPod. Admittedly, I only bought the mouse with the weird button in the middle because WalMart no longer had the old style I was used to.

Shortly after I got the newfangled mouse I was cleaning up a very long document for a legal book getting it ready to send off. This represented weeks of mind numbing labor. As I scanned down the document, all of a sudden it began to get smaller and smaller and impossibly smaller, like something out of that old sf classic "He Who Shrank".

For a second I freaked out. (Those of us who date back to sixties can do that) Oh my God! What have I done?!! Where's my work?? Bummer, man! Luckily it took only an instant for me to realize that my amazing new scroll wheel did tricks I had never guessed.

This is pretty typical of how I keep up with advances in computers. Accidental trial and total panic.

I'm still a little leery of using the function, though. Can it just keep shrinking stuff, until it passes into a microcosmic universe? (The miniscule denizens of the next universe down might be flabbergasted by insurance laws) Or might it shrink the pixels into an electronic singularity which into which my computer will disappear with a loud pop! I'm no computer geek. Who knows what all these keys and buttons and wheels really can do? Not me.