Slash and Burn, Dummies!

There's a slash right there on the keyboard, Heather!

The researcher staff here at the Antisocial Network have long understood that freelancers figure they're getting paid by the word. Even when they're paid by the chunk of (mis)information by sites like the Demand Media farms, they're still expected to provide a minimum number of words just so they can meet some mythical SEO benchmark. That's why so many eHow answers seem to get to the point by going 'round Robin Hood's barn instead of in a short, direct statement. Of course, some of their contributors don't know the short, direct statement. We're thinking of folks like Filonia LeChat (real name Heather Brautman), who gave a long, complex answer to a simple (rather stupid) question for eHow.com in "How to Make a Straight Slash in Word."¹

We've caught "Filonia" overwriting a question about MS Word before, but this one is even more foolish. Miss Kitty (le chat, in French, get it?) uses 159 words to "explain" this tortuous process when in reality all she had to do was tell them, "Look at your keyboard, fool: it's Shift+backslash!"

No, Filonia needed more words than that one sentence to meet the Demand Media minimum word count... and that's besides the obvious fact that she had no idea what she was talking about "Inserting other design elements, such as slashes, into a document, requires a little more work to hunt through Word's tabs and ribbons." It's quite clear that this moron is unaware that the vertical bar, aka the "pipe," is part of the standard character set, not a "design element." Apparently she's never tried to do simple operations in unix or DOS – she's probably one of those technological cripples who has to ask Siri to do everything for her. That's why she thinks that to insert the vertical slash, you must

1. Click the "Shapes" button on the ribbon below the tab. Choose the first option in the "Line" section to form the slash...
2. Press and hold down the "Shift" key on the keyboard. Click the page and drag the cursor, to form the desired length of slash...

Really? You have to go through two steps to draw a friggin' line on the page every time you need one of these: "|"? What kind of moron is this woman, anyway? Wait, we know: she's the Antisocial Network's

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¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/how_8531515_make-straight-slash-word.html

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