When Word goes awry

What would I do without Techie Pal? And what would you do if opened every blog post with a rhetorical question? Would you still read it? Sorry, moving on.

See, I was working in Word and had a thought I wanted to set aside from the main text. So I made a few consecutive underscores and then hit enter. It transformed into a thick, dark line and I wrote my mental note below.

I returned to the main body and everything was fine until I wanted to use the text below the dark line. I cut and pasted it into the appropriate place. When I did, the thick black line followed AND remained where it was in the first place. I tried to delete the black line the way I always delete stuff—by hitting delete. Nothing. Then backspace. Nothing. Then I highlighted a whole section surrounding the line (for good measure) and deleted the whole thing, intending to write the text back in after removing the offending line. Black line remained and text disappeared.

Then I had the idea to copy the text above and below the lines and paste it into a new document, while leaving the black lines in the hideous original, which was now riddled with them from all of my cutting, deleting, and reorganizing. I would subsequently banish said document from my PC kingdom and move on with my project and my life. The black line followed into the new document. I tried the help button, which didn't help at all, and then I pulled a friend into my mess. It went on in much the same manner except that I was now wasting his time too and ready to quit the PC altogether and resort to hieroglyphics or a stick in the sand.

And then, I called Techie Pal and sent him the offending document. He sent it back clean and beautiful with the following message, "I did Ctrl+A and chose the formatting style Normal. That seemed to remove whateverthosewere. Dang evil lines. I have seen them before, and they haunt me to this very day. *shiver*"

The lines were gone and I went back to work wondering what I'd do without Techie Pal. I hope I never have to find out.