Every second day, like clockwork, a little
notification dutifully pops up somewhere around the bottom corner
of my laptop screen, solemnly announcing the need for new updates that cant
wait to be installed; all I had to do was say yes. For those of you who still
don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s the little notification that, when
clicked, says something along the lines below:
Now, I’m never quite sure exactly how to feel about
these updates. It’s a bit like the weather in Bangalore right now – you cant
decide whether it’s the winter part of spring, spring itself or summer already.
The mornings make you feel like it’s still cold, that uniquely pale-shadow-of-winter
type weather so characteristic of Bangalore winters. It’s weather that warrants
the use of a light jacket and the exercise of a modicum of caution when it
comes to consuming all things cold. Yet by mid afternoon the sun is beating
down on you so fiercely that you’re cursing global warming and once again
dreading that the upcoming summer is going to be the worst ever. You can’t
quite decide whether you should be having cold water or simply having a cold,
and you end up having both and promptly falling ill. In short, you’re utterly
confused and don’t quite know which way to go with weather like this.
Coming back to the updates, on the one side it
warms the cockles of your heart to know that there are thousands and thousands
of programmers slaving away over their computers day and night so they can
improve your experience every two days in ways you’ll absolutely never ever
notice. While you go about your everyday life, they’re busy fixing bugs you
didn’t know existed and making infinitesimally small improvements all the time
in case you thought they just went off to hide under rocks once the software or
application was created. But hey, it’s the thought that matters, so even though
I never feel the need for an update, I should be grateful for it. And I always
was.
Until.
This one occasion, back in younger, more innocent
times when I would blindly let the system install all the updates it ever
wished to, the laptop just crashed without explanation in the middle of one of
these updates. I mean, sure, a laptop never crashes and then offers you an
explanation for it, but the system updation, with its alluring promise of a
smoother experience and fixed bugs and eradication of all problems big and
small, had instead gone and done the opposite – crashed and made me lose
everything.
So I have every reason to stiffen into a state of
suspicion each time that notification for updates pops up. And while I would
like nothing better than to simply ignore it and forget about it, it just
doesn’t pan out that way. The first few times you’re able to dismiss that
notification with a spirit of reckless abandon, but slowly it starts worming
its way into your consciousness. Each time you fire up the laptop, it’s just
there; this little red circle gnawing away at the back of your mind like the time you’re not
quite sure if you’ve switched the gas off. Sure, you can ignore it for a while,
but it’ll keep coming back. It’s like switching your phone off in a flight
during take off – you know that it probably won’t really interfere with the
plane’s signals and cause it to crash into the ground, but just in the
one-in-a-million chance that it does, why risk it? It’s the same with the
updates – you’re quite sure it’s probably useless and wont make any difference,
but what if there’s a new super mega virus or Trojan horse or other similarly
devious malware created by an evil Eastern European computer hacker that will cause
your laptop to crash while everyone else stays safe because they’d installed
their updates and you didn’t?
And this is only the laptop that I’m talking about
– on the phone it’s almost impossible to ignore these updates beyond a while because
it’s always there until you haven’t installed it, and the list keeps piling up
the longer you put it off. Straightforward game apps where you cant, for the life of you,
see any avenue for improvements are constantly hankering for updates. Even
things I didn’t know my phone had, like a plug-in for a Korean keyboard,
something I’ve never used and never will use, conscientiously needs to be
updated every few days. And while the updates haven’t caused my phone to crash
yet, I know that they keep eating into the storage space until a day will
finally come that everything is so updated that my phone has no space left to
perform any other function.
That, if nothing else, might finally get me to buy
a new phone!
3 comments:
Buy a new phone! Good idea. :D
Haha, right! One day it'll happen, don't worry ;)
I always ignore these updates and never bother,hate waiting for a few minutes and have never felt the difference. But then again,every now and then saurabh takes my phone and keeps updating and updating! Possibly that is why I can't make out the difference, someone else takes care of the maintainence. Well written.
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