Insert button infuriating during word processing

I will probably make the mistake at least twice while writing this column. It's inevitable. I'll be typing a sentence, decide that I want to change something, then, as my finger hovers over the backspace key, I'll slip and accidentally hit it.

The Insert button.

You may not be familiar with the Insert button by name, but I'm sure you're aware of its nature. The Insert button, located not-so-conveniently in the general vicinity of our friend Backspace, is the source of most of my word processing anguish. The first few times I hit this menace, I had no clue what had happened. I started typing again, and all of a sudden, the sentence in front of what I was writing had been replaced by all the new things I was writing. I didn't know what to do. I pressed Control-Z, which worked, but I knew it wasn't the real answer. Pressing Insert again is the only true solution to this quandary.

Want to see what happens when you hit the Insert button? ... Hippogaroos. See! I was TRYING to write "hippopotamus and kangaroos," but the Insert button foiled me, making an entirely new word. And not a cool word, either. I'm sure if they tried to mate a hippopotamus with a kangaroo, it would turn out to be a very fat, squatty animal with big bouncy feet and a pouch. Not exactly something you can turn in for an eighth-grade science project.

So why does this button even exist? I mean, it seems like you could do the same thing by highlighting the text and just typing something new in.

"It is a toggle key that determines what happens when you type new characters within an existing line of text or numbers," said Julie Smith, a Microsoft hardware representative, in an e-mail. "When the Insert key is on, the new text that you type is inserted at the cursor location and the text already in place is moved to the right."

Actually, no, that's not what happens. When the Insert key is on, it in fact WRITES OVER the text that's already in place; it doesn't move it to the right at all. If that were the case, it would still say "hippopotamus and kangaroos" up above.

Insert is also an incredibly tricky key. It's very difficult to know that you've hit it - until it's too late.

"There is usually no visual indication of whether the Insert key is on or off," Smith said.

In reality, this isn't true either. There is ONE way to know if you've accidentally released the beast. When Insert is activated, the letters OVR, or overwrite will be highlighted at the bottom of your screen. Which means your text is about to be written over. Which, in basic terms, means you're fucked. At this point, I'm pretty convinced that I know more about Insert than Microsoft itself, which doesn't exactly ease my fears about the button - or PCs in general.

So I'm making a stand for the removal of Insert. It's a menace to society, nobody likes it and even its friends SysRq and Print Screen (which share the same key) don't want to hang out with it anymore. Btw, wtf is SysRq? I'd hit it and find out, but I'm too afraid it will suck my arm into the monitor.

Macintosh computers don't have Insert, and they also don't have viruses. Correlation? I think so. So there are two solutions to this problem: either go out and buy a Mac, or remove the Insert button and replace it with something useful. Like an emergency eject button for your chair.