Recently I broke my computer, hubby’s computer and my sewing machine all in one day. Turns out I had help:  updates.  The day before my technical difficulties, our computers downloaded the latest operating system updates.  My computer took exception to this and decided not to allow me to log on the next morning, no matter how many times I turned it off and on at the surge protector.  I managed to log on to hubby’s computer but then it wouldn’t shut down.  Turning it off and on at the surge protector took care of that problem and I managed to get it to reboot properly.

That left me with a finicky sewing machine and my computer with a bad hard drive error message. The sewing machine has since been serviced and calibrated, so it is good to go.

Hubby did some magic by attaching my hard drive to his computer and running it though a file checker. Result?  There is nothing wrong with my  hard drive.  He re-installed it.  It booted up fine.  He applied the service pack.  It crashed.  This is, as they say, a clue.  He backed out the updates and here I am, writing on my computer.

But updates lurk everywhere.  My smart phone has a shopping application that I use regularly.  It’s easy to take an item off the list:  just touch the item and a deletion line shows up over it.  To remove all the crossed out items, I just have to shake the phone a little. It vibrates and moves the items off of the current shopping list to the main list.

Or at least that’s the way it was before The Update.

I was at Whole Foods Market.  I put the apples in my cart.  I touched “apples” on my shopping list and the deletion line appeared.   After a few more items, I decided I wanted to see the whole list without scrolling.  I shook my phone, gently, to remove the deleted items.  Nothing.  I tried it again.  Still nothing.  I shook it purposefully.  Just as purposefully, those items stayed on my shopping list, crossed out.  I had downloaded an update to this app in the last week or so, but I didn’t consider this an improvement.  Surely, I thought, it must just be me.

With that in mind, I tried a few different approaches.  In the middle of the cereal aisle, I shook my phone up and down as if I were a bartender preparing a martini.  (That’s shaken, not stirred, right?)  I pretended I was a maraca musician and shook it rhythmically back and forth in a 180-degree arc from left to right with a little hip shimmy thrown in.

I meandered over to the refrigerated section, stood in front of the orange juice and then I got serious.  I choked my phone with both hands and growled at it, much like acting-Captain Spock did to acting-First Officer Kirk in the bridge fight scene in Star Trek 2009.  (Can we all say “emotionally compromised“?)

I could not get those deleted items to move off the main shopping list.

At home, I mentioned this to hubby. He had noticed the same thing when using that app on his smart phone.  He then showed me that the new version included a drop-down feature of “Clear marked items.”

Oh.  At this point I reminded myself that “update” is not the same as “upgrade.”