Modern Goats

Mr Slocum has a reputation as a great navigator, certainly helped by his writing his own story, but if he was such a great navigator why did he let a goat eat his charts? I think him a rather dubious character, but he did write a great book before losing his boat with all hands.
Here is a modern trap for navigators! My chart table is actually much tidier than it looks to the untrained eye, but on this occasion I'd left the camera on the corner to remind me to take a photo of the village as we left Manihi. In the end, the pass was too scary to leave the wheel and the camera sat forgotten. Out to sea it got quite rolly quite quickly, and things were moving inside the boat... the camera jumped onto the computer keyboard. We have had this problem before. In the past it has been people who don't love computers but love to write in log-books, simply placing log-books on the nearest convenient surface, the computer keyboard! However, this time I can only blame myself. If a camera or log-book happen to rest on the 'enter' key, and where else would they go, the navigation software begins to enter 'New Mark's. And continues to enter them. Until the camera or log-book is removed or the computer crashes. In this case for quite some time. Now a couple of 'New Marks' are all in a days work, but if you put in a few thousand you bring the computer to it's knees and it can no longer tell you where you are, where you are going, or the children's birthdays. There are two ways to remove the offending marks. You can remove All Marks, which includes the ones that tell you where you want to go and where you have been, or you can take them off one at a time by hand. Since the computer is on it's knees this takes a long time. Especially unrewarding are the places on the chart where the boat didn't roll, so the mouse stayed still and you have a few hundred marks on the same spot. 'Select' 'delete' 'select' delete'. Forty minutes and a sore mouse hand later we are navigating again. OK in a clear sea but it would be unpleasant if were between motus in the dark!