Ah, Notepad! a rambling on my fav text editor!

The setting must be pretty familiar to most of us, it was one of those meetings, where you are being introduced to the various departments in your firm.
The speaker is some one who specializes in making people sleep when that is the last thing in their mind. And the topic is the value addition they bring in to the organization and the software tools which help them bring in those value addition. I'm sorry for repeating the words value addition in the previous sentence. Perhaps, it has to do with all those "value addition" and "moving up the value chain" meetings I been to!

Acrobat Writer, MS Word, Help Builder, Photoshop... the software tool list was long.

But sadly, our humble Notepad application never found a mention!

"Don’t we use Notepad application here at all? " an inquisitive soul in the audience.

"Yes we do!" nodded the speaker.

"Then, doesn’t it deserves a mention here?", the eager soul again.

The speaker was not sure! And the guffaws which emerged from the audience were, if anything, to suggest this eager soul being silly, yet again!

They must have been using it more times than the tools mentioned above or even more than the total number of times put together.

I'm sure their Run window will vouch for it too... and still the scorn!

To make the insult to the Notepad complete, the Windows operating system has placed it so far in the Programs list that if one bothers to measure the distance one's mouse has traveled over the years, to open the Notepad; the distance Ferdinand Magellan covered to circumnavigate the world in his ship would look meager (luckily Magellan's ship was not built by the same engineers who built Titanic!) .
If you are wondering who this Ferdinand Magellan is, he was the author of the theory "If you run in a circle you will end up where you have started!"

But as fate would have it, to give Magellan his due credit in the human history (which incidentally only studied by humans!), there is an easier way to invoke the Notepad by typing it into the Windows Run window.

To my mind, there is hardly an application which is taken for granted as much as Notepad is. Sadly the reason being the human being's inability to appreciate common sense! If that point brings a grin on to your face, I suggest, you read human history; again. Trust me, It is full of that!

As a matter of fact, Notepad is closer to life than any other application is.
It never thought in order to get one's idea across, one need to make it in BOLD or Italics as there is no human language which lets one speak in Italics (not to confuse Italian with Italics). And I am yet to come across some one who talks in BOLD too!

Notepad never allow you to undo the last 16008 changes or mistakes because if you are making so many, need I say, you are not supposed to be doing it, really!

And coming close to life, this is a luxury life never offers to you. Simply put, there isn't a way to undo any of our acts... then why spoil us!

I'm grateful to Notepad for it never tried to correct Madan Lal as Madam Lolly, nor did it suggest me to change my name (my dad's too!) just because the dictionary it carries doesn’t have our!

I'm often amazed by the braveness displayed by the Notepad. It never shies away from any file you asked it to open. The last time when I opened a .dll file, it did show me the amount of junk gone into the making of that dll!

Notepad hasnt changed much over the years, perhaps it knows "More they change... more they remain the same!" and "all those changes are not really changes too!"

So, my dear reader, next time you open a Notepad, spare a thought for this no-nonsense tool.

Not the least because it will not force you to click on START when actually what you want to do is a SHUTDOWN, as saddled by the Operating System you and I use!