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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

The Robot Uprising Begins

It started innocently enough as a Face Book update. I didn't notice. I failed to notice the daily ADOBE updates. In retrospect that should have been my first warning. Just how often does a program I never use need to update. I mean, really? How many PDFs do I actually own? Three?

The Twitter changes should have sent me running for a bunker. Why would anyone take something as wonderful as Twitter and try to make it more like Face Book? I'm still lost and confused trying to find my tweets.

But the final straw came Tuesday morning a little after 3am. Bleary eyed, I was awake to feed the Grumble Bunny - again - and a fumbled for the phone at my bedside. My phone is my alarm clock, my calendar, my link to humanity on the dark days when I can't escape my pastoral prison and I'm craving the city scene. In the dark watches of the night I cling to me phone like the little life raft of sanity that it is. But in that hope forsaken hour I found the dread word "UPDATING" taunting me from my phone's screen.

No midnight Twitter. No e-books on my Kindle app. No updating the family blog in a sleepy haze. I wept bitter, hot tears as the phone shut down, then loaded, then shut down and loaded again. An hour later as Grumble Bunny cooed and giggled, oblivious to my sorrow, my phone finally came back online with nothing on it. The screens I'd spent the better of a year customizing were blank. My bookmarks were gone. The much-abused blogger link I used to send pictures of Baby to MeeMaw was gone. Even my books were missing!

I felt betrayed by my trusted tech. The careful little cyber-utopia I had established in my tiny corner of the world was destroyed with one foul update. My phone still isn't fully restored. I go to use an app only to find it's been erased from my phone and I need to download it all over again. Or that the app exists, and all the data on the app has mysteriously vanished.

And then this morning the desktop computer wouldn't work!

The robots are out to get us. This is only the beginning. So, excuse me while I retreat to my editing cave and sharpen my spear. When I return we'll see who gets updated!!!

5 comments:

  1. Time for a lot of EMPs and divide by zero jokes!

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  2. I'm sure that will make sense when I've had a couple hours of sleep... #ZombieAuthor #NeedsANap

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  3. It's just the old programmer in me.

    Oh, I was also thinking of sixties sci-fi were errant AIs were taken out by some sort of paradoxical question or what have you.

    I forget if it was Star Trek or The Prisoner where they killed one one AI by asking it one contextless question: "Why?"

    Glib philosophy is apparently the ultimate anti-AI weapon. :p

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  4. By EMP in this context, I meant electromagnetic pulse.

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  5. These are the requests we get:

    "Can you just make it automatically do it to where I don't have to do anything?"

    "Can you just program it to answer with a "Yes" automatically?"

    "When I open the database, can you automatically have it populated with data from my PC?"

    My answer:

    "When I'm done making all these changes, do you think you would need to get paid to work here anymore?"

    If given enough time and money, I'm sure I can save any company a good penny or two. :)

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