Upgrade Me, Please

It’s probably my own fault for using three electronic devices. This explains why I spend half my life being hounded about updates for my apps.

Right now, I need to update 11 apps on my iPad, three on my iPhone, and my computer is constantly bugging me to install some new gizmo and then restart. (Restart! Like I don’t have more pressing things to do like reading Jezebel.) Anyway, I could have sworn I just did all of this yesterday, so why don’t they leave me alone, since I am not in the mood to update today, so get off my back.

Can’t I just enjoy the boring old status quo for, say, a few hours? No, not in the high-tech age. Every millisecond bursts with new apps, updates for old apps, hot new venues that everybody but you is using, improvements that will change your life, devices that will transform your world.

I try to embrace it all in my poky, plodding, late middle-aged way, all the while ignoring invectives that email is over, baby, and blogging is passe. But too much progress every micro-minute of the day and I become a little churlish.

Thank you for thinking of me so relentlessly, high-tech world, but you’re not giving me the updates I really need to enhance my life. Let me tell you what I need. (And, oh sure, I should note I purloined the idea from my friend Betsy, who’s been insufferable ever since her doctor told her she has the colon of a 25-year-old.) Anyway:

PERSONAL UPDATES WISH LIST FOR MS. R. PENNEBAKER

* Energy upgrade. I needed this five years ago, but I’m not greedy or unrealistic. I don’t need the energy of a child or an adolescent — just the firepower I had in my forties;

An upgraded right shoulder that doesn’t ache when I use it;

* A new set of choppers that don’t chip or crack or know the cruel meaning of the term “sensitive teeth.”

Believe me, I could go on and on laying out my growing number of physical complaints and fears, but I can’t think of anything more boring. Suffice it to say I would really appreciate the high-tech world addressing whatever’s about to break down in my body and just leave Dropbox the way it is (since I never use Dropbox, anyway, and am not even sure what it’s for).

While writing this, I emailed Betsy to see if her doctor had really said she had the colon of a 25-year-old and whether she’d mind my mentioning it. She wrote back that I could tell the world about it, but the doctor had really said she had the colon of a 20-year-old.

You see what I mean? I am surrounded by unnecessary updates and corrections that usually only make me feel worse.

(Copyright 2014 by Ruth Pennebaker)

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