I don't usually let myself spuriously anthropomorphise gadgets, because then I get too drawn into the faux humanity I invent for them. I had to abandon my claim that when my mobile beeps to signify that it is out of battery it is "crying because it is hungry" when it became too sad to contemplate; when MS Office Assistant once asked me "hey, you seem to have minimised me a few times, would you like me to go away permanently?" I just couldn't do it to the forlorn little paperclip guy.
Unforturnately yesterday Scott Adams mentioned in passing that when his computer pops up a bunch of update alerts of a morning it is "begging for updates", so this morning I found myself unable to resist imy computer's pleas and clicked "yes" every time.
And this led to an important discovery. Every morning for the past month, maybe two, Flash and Firefox and a bunch of other applications have begged me for updates (I already know I'll never be able to turn one of these updates down again, damn it) and I've ignored them, assuming it would waste perhaps minutes or even hours. Clicking "no" every morning has wasted perhaps five seconds. Which, it turns out, is about as long as it took for all those updates to complete. These things should really come with a note that they will be done in a matter of seconds, so I can can make a sensible cost/benefit analysis rather than just assuming guessing they'll be a nuisance.
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