Fragility

We're reminded once again of the fragility of modern life.  

This fragility can express itself in many different ways.  First, of course, there's the matter of health - impermanence is swift, life-and-death is the great matter. After that, there's our dependence on infrastructure - power goes out and within a few hours the interior of homes in the American South gets uncomfortably warm, after a few days food turns bad and besides you can't cook anyway, and after that water no longer runs and sanitation becomes its own emergency.

And then, even in the availability of power, there's the matter of our dependency on our electronic devices, our computers, our smartphones, and the Internet.  As we noted last week, with the right attitude retirement is far from boring provided, that is, that one has a high-speed Internet connection. We should have added that one also has to have working hardware with which to access that high-speed connection.

We've suffered computer crashes before with varying results - once we were lucky enough to be able to recover most of the data on our hard drive but another time we lost everything - music, pictures, documents, programs, you name it.

We now have a back-up external hard drive (thanks, Britney!) and we thankfully did not suffer a catastrophic crash today, but starting the ol' laptop up this morning we found that we weren't able to log on to our Microsoft account.  With Windows 10, if you're not logged in, most of your programs aren't functional,  you can't access your stored files, your bookmarks are gone, and the computer can't recall the memorized passwords.  The computer still works, it just doesn't work for you.  It's sort of like being on somebody else's computer, someone with a notably empty hard drive.

We'd enter our password, that little circle thing would spin for a long, long while, and then an error code would pop up saying it couldn't log in to our account.  But most of the times, it advised, this problem can be fixed by first logging out and then just logging back in again.  Which we did, many, many times, but we were still denied access.  We used our iPhone to search Google for fixes to this problem, and a post on a Microsoft help desk suggested that a reboot was in order - simply turn the computer off and then back on again - and warned that it might take several reboots before the problem was fixed.   So we rebooted, again and again and again, but still weren't able to access our account.

At this point, professional help seemed in order, so we took our laptop over to our local repair shop and had them look at it.  They ran some diagnostics and said that our version of Windows 10 was "two builds back" and that the latest versions didn't auto-download for some reason, and that our problem was a known issue because of this.  They showed us where to get the free upgrade to the current build, told us to make sure we were backed up, and then told us to update the OS at home, as the download and installation can take a long time.

They weren't kidding.  Some four hours later, we finally completed the upgrade, and sure enough, were finally able to access our account.  Hurray!  But here's the rub: the new account has the same empty settings as when we were first locked out, that is, most of our programs weren't functional,  our bookmarks were gone, and our computer couldn't recall the memorized passwords.  It took a while, but we eventually found the missing files (downloads, documents and pictures) that weren't backed up on our external hard drive, so at least there's that. 

We're going to have to search the web for all of those important sites like our bank account, our credit cards, our Medicare and Social Security accounts, and so on, and log in with new passwords (the old passwords were all computer-generated and stored in the cloud).  We're going to have to reload all of our downloaded programs and tools (Spotify, Office, etc.), and possibly re-register them with new user names and passwords.  It's not the worst thing that could have happened, not by a long shot, but it's going to be a long, tedious process for each and every web site, downloaded program, etc.

On the positive side, now that we're retired, we have all the time in the world for this long tedious process, and maybe this new "hobby" is exactly what we needed. Also, a fresh, new, Chapter Three start for our computer as we settle into old age and retirement.  

But our point here isn't to complain about our problems - we'll fix them all eventually.  It's the sobering reminder of the fragility of modern times, and how the smallest hiccup by material things can affect the quality of our life.