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Pearl River     No, this is not another ranting madness update.  We hear too much of that.  What did Trump do yesterday or this morning or a minute ago?  Did he pardon a buddy? Make par on one of golf courses, finally? Announce some kind of war?  Against Iran? Against trade?  Against the virus?  Against horse flies?  No, this is more in the nature of a pet peeve or maybe, just maybe, a universal problem for all of us who are now regular users of computers.  And, by computers, I mean computers that we can afford, which is to say, not Apple.  I know nothing about Apple, and that’s pretty much exactly how much I want to know.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and on and on, let’s face it:  we live in their world now, whether we like it or not.  As peons in their fiefdoms, at least for now, why can’t we at least get respect?  That brings me to update madness.

First, I’ll admit, it used to be worse.  Updates were more like kamikaze strikes.  They came out of nowhere, and they didn’t care what they might kill what you were painstakingly working on.  There’s still some of that for sure, but it’s not quite as bad as it was a couple of years ago.

[Excuse me for a minute, I had to quickly save this, because I’m in the middle of update madness now!]

Now Microsoft, and, yes, I’m talking about you Microsoft, let’s you know an update is coming.  Updates are important.  I get that.  I want security.  They want my data.  I appreciate the notice.  You can ignore the little icon with a red dot at the bottom of your screen, until they hit you with a big box on the right-hand side that pretends to let you set the time for an update.  You always have the choices of “now,” or “one hour,” but it looks like you can set the time.  Last week, I set it for 2 AM on a Wednesday morning.  They said it would be a long one.  At 530 AM, I woke the computer up, and they said they were ready to go then or in an hour.  My only choices, it seemed.  What happened to the middle of the night, gang?  Who knows?  Swallowing hard, I hit, now.  Maybe it would be finished by the time I came back from walking Lucha? No such luck.  80 minutes later it restarted and let me back in

But, it wasn’t over.  The red light was still at the bottom.  Microsoft wasn’t finished with me.  When was I ready to go again?  Never was almost the real answer.  How about Sunday at midnight?  I set that.  I opened the computer at 530 AM, and, once again, a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.  I picked an hour.  I opened “settings.”  It said I could delay for 7-days.  I hit that a couple of times, but there was no response.  I hurriedly did what I had to do.  An hour passed.  Nothing?  I checked settings.  Somehow it was seven days or I could somehow start the updates.  Maybe they are going on now?  It’s been another couple of hours.  They say they are working.  Save me lord!

It could be worse yet.  Adobe simply announces they did an update, and it will take effect when you restart your computer.  Why?  I didn’t restart for a couple of days, because Microsoft was first in line.  What did Adobe do?  They now won’t let me save any PDFs until I do.  They are pouting and have gone on strike.

What’s so hard about making the clock work?  What’s so hard for these tech companies and their engineer robotrons to understand that there are customers, real humans, on the other side of the keyboards on the hardware that their software is running?  I don’t get it?  They want to go to Mars, but they can’t tell time.  Give us a break!