Am typing this on the Mac laptop with which the kind folk at ADCO have provided me, because my own trusty Dell (which has served me wonderfully well, in spite of the dire warnings of the Geek Squad) is too busy for me at the moment. It’s primping.
I don’t really know what it’s doing or why it’s doing it. It’s making me feel a little like the proverbial clueless guy wondering what women do when they go to the “powder room” together. Or baffled the way Dagwood was when Blondie just had to buy a new dress, and he didn’t get why.
(Not that I’ve ever been Dagwood in my own life. I’ve never been that husband who has to guard his wallet from the shopaholic wife. That is competely alien to my experience of life. First, my wife handles the money at our house, because I’m the one who can’t be trusted with it. Second, she never spends money on herself. She’s the level-headed, sensible person in the house. Which, frankly, I think is more typical of women. Maybe it’s the time and culture I came up in, but I actually think it’s more universal than that. I’ve read that the people who make microloans in the Third World have learned that it’s best to make those loans to women, because they will actually spend the money on improving their families’ economic situations. Whereas guys, well, you know — beer is not cheap… But I digress…)
What I’m ranting about here is that I had a meeting this a.m. with Leona Plaugh over Starbucks, and that put me late getting into the office, so I sit down eager to get to work, and as soon as I wake the laptop up (I never shut it down, but merely put it into sleep mode), it tells me it needs to shut down in order to install unspecified “updates.”
OK, so I let it do that — a process that can take 10 minutes, or so it seems. And then, just as I’m about to start gettin’ down to bidness, I get another dialogue saying that Adobe wants to install some critical updates. Adobe WHAT, it doesn’t say. Acrobat? PhotoShop? It doesn’t say. It just needs to go to the powder room, and it’s really tacky of me to demand why…
Why can’t the blasted thing do this when it’s in sleep mode, when I don’t need it?
Mutter. Fume. Sputter. Cartoon smoke rising from the top of my cartoon head…
You partied with two women on Monday who are the spendthrifts in their relationships. Both my parents are levelheaded, but Mom spends a ton more than Dad, too. Same with my brother and sister-in-law.
In developing nations, the women are often so officially powerless, yet ultimately responsible for the perpetuation of the populace that they have had no choice but to be level-headed or starve while the men flit about acquiring and spreading diseases such as the severe AIDS epidemic in much of Africa….
I think you might have your automatic updates set to run during the day. I run mine at night at 3 am. To set this (at least in XP), right click on My Computer, go to Properties, choose the Automatic Updates tab, and change it to how you want it.
HTH.
Hey Brad: You need to clean out your e-mail in-box. It’s not accepting messages.
Yeah–gmail doesn’t have the kinds of limitations your system does….sort of a refrain today, huh?
Get a Mac.
@Burl –he *has* a Mac, courtesy of Adco. He’s just too much of a curmudgeon to just go with it!
Some people are Mac people (like me) and some are clearly not, I guess.