By the time a person reaches “the third act” you would think that they should have enough life experience to handle challenging situations with an advanced degree of peace and well-being. We have seen our share of challenging situations after all. Even so, I have to report that when it comes to certain challenging situations (read “technology updates” here), I have limited tolerance. This intolerance was much more acute in my second act and, although certain people may disagree, I believe that I’m quite a bit better now than I used to be. It was in this belief (that I am much better now) that I continued my journey into the new world of Windows 10. Would I be exiting purgatory or was I headed straight into Dante’s Inferno? It had to be the former given the ongoing, warm messaging telling me that everything went so well and that “everything” was “exactly” where I had left it. No matter how skeptical I may have been in the past I was “ready”…

Whenever I install an update of this magnitude the first thing I do is make sure that the critical pieces are “exactly where I had left them”. For me, this first and foremost means checking Outlook contact and calendar information. Without that, I have trouble knowing what I have to do. That’s where I went first. And just like “they” said, it was “exactly where I had left them”, except they weren’t. In fact they were nowhere to be found. Given my “third act Zen-like” attitude I took a deep breath and do what we all do now – I consulted the all-knowing oracle, “The Google”. I am very glad that we now have others who are readily available that we can share our grief and concern with. And sure enough there were many people who upgraded to Windows 10 and saw their must needed contacts and calendars, evaporate into the ether. Not to worry, try this or that or this or that and then this and that and all will be well. I tried a few of those things and got pretty much nowhere. So, I consulted my next best oracle, my daughter (could have been my son however this time my daughter happened to be available.) She assured me that she could probably help and so I closed the lid on this day and looked forward to the next afternoon when I would surely find the lost treasure.

The next day, with almost no effort at all, the lost items were found. Seems like it just takes a while for things to update. Would be nice if they just said that (curse of knowledge?). What I did notice however was that my screen has dimmed to the point where it was nigh on impossible to see anything. What now? Back to “The Google”. Ah yes, I had many new friends who had experienced the same thing. Who wouldn’t want a feature installed that “automatically adjusts your screen to whatever light is in the room”, which in my case meant, “We don’t care how much light there is in the room, we are dimming your screen”. And once again, taking the advice of my new internet advisors, all I had to do was go, “here and there, and then, here and there, and then click “this” and voila, “there was light”.

…But wait, why is my “right click” functionality not working? Can I just say here that my calm demeanour was pretty much still intact? Back to “The Google”. More new friends. But this time, the advice seemed a bit more unnerving. I won’t even begin to recount all the myriad ways that people out there were trying to get their “right click” back. I did try a few recommended actions only to find that not only did I not have a right click, I did not have a track pad at all! And now I must report that all semblance of calm was gone. I basically started to panic. No easy way to ask the oracle now. This current situation set off a kind of “Keystone Cops skit” that had me racing around the house searching for a long forgotten mouse, pulling batteries from clocks and any other device in an attempt to power up the mouse, plugging it all into the computer, hoping that THIS WOULD WORK. And, thankfully it did. Phew! Now at least I was back to limited “track ability”.

I could go on here but at some point it all starts to sound like a bad movie. I could for instance tell you that after a whole lot more searching I was finally able to find an answer to my right click issue. Got that fixed. I could also tell you that my screen dimmed again and after a whole lot more searching I found an answer to that too. I could even tell you that I could not use my computer for my first corporate Power Point presentation because Windows 10 kicked out my drivers for this sort of thing. I could tell you that…but what’s the point.

What I did find humorous (almost) was that a week or so after all of this “learning and Zen challenging experience”, a message popped up telling me that I could “free up hard drive space if I deleted the old version of Windows” – “just click here”. Okay, no problem. What made me laugh, (sort of) was that this message seemed so inviting. “Come on now, free up some space”. When I went to do this, the next message took on a far darker tone. “Deleting the old version of Windows will not allow you to ever go back. Do this at your own peril”, or something like that. Talk about the bait and switch. But heck, at this point I was up for anything. I went for it.

It’s been over a month now. Other than a few minor hiccups, things are pretty much okay. And, best of all, I can say with a good amount of confidence that I have learned some new things and still managed to keep my sense of well-being. And in the world of “updates”, that is saying something. Who says I’m entering my third act “kicking and screaming”. That can’t be me!

Onward…