It wasn’t enough to add the usual baking and shopping and holiday partying to the December agenda.
It was also the perfect time, I decided, to upgrade my laptop operating system and get a new phone.
Why put up with spinning wheels and sluggish apps when I was already in a holiday rush?
“I am carving out a whole week in December for this,” I told my husband, “just in case something goes wrong.”
He threw me a look that said, “You are about to embark on the worst Twelve Days of Christmas ever.”
But at the time, I saw “Great idea!” And sprinted off to the Apple Store.
On the first day of Computer Christmas, the Genius Bar gave to me a new operating system, El Capitan, and instructions to come back in half an hour “while we transfer everything over.”
I did – several times that night and again the next afternoon – because they had “encountered a problem.”
But on the second day of Computer Christmas, the geniuses said to me, “All done,” and sure enough it ran faster. I just couldn’t read all my files, find all my e-mail, or print anything.
“Oh, that,” said tech support. “You just need to reinstall your third-party software and contact your ISP.”
Never mind what an ISP might be. I could look that up. But the idea of reinstalling anything terrifies me. It assumes that if there was a disk involved I have saved it, and that if I find it, I’ll know what to do next.
“It’s simple,” the geniuses said to me on the Fourth Day, and with soulful eyes said if it was not third-party, they would do it for me. But alas….
By the Fifth Day, by some Christmas miracle I found and installed the disks. My files awoke and spoke to me in real English instead of kanji. I was so giddy that I searched for the wireless printer, and much to my wondering eyes, it appeared.
“Week’s not up!” I announced. “Time to get the phone!”
On the Sixth Day of Computer Christmas, the Apple sales crew – now dressed in festive red for the holidays – handed me a new phone loaded with new apps and said to me, “Just take it home and connect it to your WiFi.”
This somehow engaged the Cloud, which began populating the phone with photos from every holiday, birthday and vacation since 2007, along with warning notices that e-mail could not be retrieved because other devices – which were actually turned off – were in use. This prompted calls to the now-familiar ISP, who “changed the network settings.”
On the Seventh Day of Computer Christmas, the Wi-Fi and now the printer said to me…absolutely nothing, which prompted an Eighth Day trip to the ISP for a new modem, a Ninth Day rush order to California for a printer cable just in case, and Tenth and Eleventh Day trips to the mall since I was obviously not doing any online Christmas shopping. But happily the phone was working so I could call home.
“I’m not even going to finish by the Twelfth Day of Christmas!” I wailed, to which my true love responded that the Twelve Days don’t even start till Christmas Day and end on Epiphany.
I guess that puts me ahead of schedule. Where epiphanies are concerned, I I’ve already had a few.
Copyright 2015 Pat Snyder
