Update

It said an update is ready, click here, so I clicked afraid if I didn’t I’d be left behind, out of the loop, which is worse than exile in 300 B.C. Greece, left to wander across barren pages, void of typographical topography until I make my way to an ice flow recycle bin for deletion. Inclined to do as I’m told I then hit download and that brought me to six paragraphs of fine print scrupulously unread by me or anyone including the person who wrote it. Naturally I swore I’d agree to every syllable and then hit the next button and watched a green worm make its way across the page until I was congratulated for successfully following the prompts and as a result …..

I’ve lost all my passwords so my bank doesn’t recognize me and they aren’t sure I am me and I’m also not sure I’m me… but I just checked my driver’s license and sure enough I am me thus avoiding an existential crisis… because I failed to answer my first security question which was, What is your favorite movie? They don’t ask me something like the street I was raised on or my father’s middle name which never changed but my favorite movie changes from film to film so I guessed at a musical and was wrong and then made another stab. (Strange how most films that come to mind were made before 1960….Casablanca, Citizen Kane, His Girl Friday, Inherit the Wind, The Third Man,The Godfather. Lives of Others…some Ingmar Bergman, Krysztof Kieslowski and a few Woody Allen).

Wrong again so I called the 866 number and a robotic man gave me multiple choices to choose one address I had lived at among many; but none were familiar until I vaguely recalled that my ex-wife lived there 27 years ago and that saved me a visit from the Update Police, a branch of the National Security Agency who would have hauled me off for hacking into my own computer and sent me to Greenland to cool off for a while on a calving glacier.

The next time I’m asked to upgrade, update or upload anything I shall respectfully decline even if it goes on my record as, a Decliner, a most dreaded designation. They don’t tell you they are going to reconfigure you. Luckily my face remains symmetrical but I’m not altogether sure my nose landed in the middle. 

It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Decliners are the subject of some diabolical app by which you are dematerialized and wake up in a cave with other troglodytes typing away on their manual Underwoods with sticky keys using ink eradicator and carbon paper where the word, blog, does not exist.