What took so long?

Word to the wise: Get to know your technology.
It can save you a few bucks and maybe even months of procrastination.
Last summer, I set out to make my daughter and son-in-law a 1st anniversary gift — a collection of recipes they'd enjoyed at our house.
Problem was I didn't want to retype them all. And I didn't want to just photocopy and staple them together.
So .... since the first year's traditional gift is something paper, that's what they got: An IOU.
Before long I ordered "Readiris 12," software that would enable me to magically scan the recipes and they'd turn into editable files.
Cool.
But first, I'd have to read all the how-tos for my scanner and for the Readiris.
I still haven't.
Luckily (if you call feeling stupid lucky) I didn't have to.
The scanner is pretty intuitive for the basic picture scanning I've wanted to do over the last few months. So, there's been very little reading involved.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was searching my desktop for something and came across a familiar word -- Readiris.
I looked to my left to make sure the software I'd bought was still snug and unopened on the shelf. It was. All I could conclude was that it came with the MacMini 3 or 4 years ago.
Geesh.
Yesterday, I finally decided to get started. I turned on the scanner, hit its little icon, and all this fabulous stuff came up on the desktop, including a thin strip of tasks it would do.
What's this?
OCR?
Great.
Optical character somethingorother.
Even the scanner had come with the ability to turn articles, recipes, you name it, into text I can play with.
If I'd only known ....