Introducing Tuggie the Techno-Owl

Welcome to the first post by Tuggie, the Techno-Owl. Tuggie’s smart enough to know that nobody knows everything, and discrete enough to teach you things you can claim to have always known.

Howdy, my little owlets. Here’s my first Hint Hoot. Hope to see you often here on the STUG blog.

When in doubt, right-click. I finally got it one day when, for the umpty-umpth time, I screamed at my screen and cursed at my computer. I actually wrote When in doubt, right-click on a Post-It and stuck it to the monitor.

It’s a good rule. Before you start thinking the programmer was a total idiot, the computer is having a meltdown, or the stars are misaligned and you might as well stop working and go float around in the pool with a rum and coke balanced on your tummy…. right-click.

Aha! There the little bugger is: just the menu choice you were clicking the left mouse button for, over and over, swearing it had to be there. All you had to do was…right-click. You’ll more than likely find a “contextual” menu. That means you’ll see a list of things you can do with whatever it is you clicked on.

Life lesson learned: take a different approach. Try a different path to your destination. And sometimes thinking outside the box works before you have to resort to A: throwing the whole problem out the window in disgust or B: dousing yourself with rum and cokes.

When in doubt, right-click.