You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
OS 7
That’s geek tech talk for Operating System 7.
Well OS 7.
You can KMA.
That’s Life’s Crazy talk for …
So I have an old saying if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
My stupid iphone has been asking me for weeks to upgrade my operating system. Fix something that ain’t broke, it keeps demanding.
I keep saying no. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Don’t you new millennium simpletons understand that?
But it has updates you need, I’m told.
I’m an old dog. I don’t need any new tricks. I don’t want any new tricks.
Leave me the heck alone, OS. Go bother some kids on instagram. They only have 7 seconds of attention span. Your new world order is perfect for them.
The new OS will protect you from viruses and cyber attacks from the North Koreans I am told.
Screw the North Koreans. I don’t care. I am a dinosaur. If the North Koreans can take over the planet by invading my contact list, then this is a sorry ass world.
GET OFF MY LAWN O.S. 7 BEFORE I CALL THE COPS!
You need to update the OS, I am warned over and over and over.
update. update. update.
ARRRGHHHH!
So one day I try and do it. Don’t ask me why? Perhaps it’s like Chinese water torture. You just succumb to the constant drip drip drip on your forehead and you give in. Perhaps I am feeling brave or irreverent or drunk.
But then; more OS B.S. “Hey you have no room for the new OS” the dumb phone tells me through a little box on the front of my stupid little phone.
Huh?
You need so many GB and I only have so many GB of space.
I hate this talk. GB and terra bites.
Bite me. Bite this.
Get Off my lawn!
I want a big phone with big holes and numbers and a big rotary wheel that clicks.
I want to wear coke glass bottles while I dial. I want to smoke a big cigar like Milton Berle on the Texaco theater.
I don’t even know what that means.
I want to make phone calls like my grandmother did. I want to scream the number EIGHT while dialing the number EIGHT. I want to count the clicks as the big dial rotates around and around.
and what’s so bad about snail mail? It employes a lot of people. I want to send letters through the mail like my grandpa did. Someone get me a .53 stamp. I going off the reservation.
OS. Kiss my ass.
Whew….
Now I’m feeling better.
So I start looking to take something out of my phone and make space. I hate this. What am I removing? Do I need it? What is it attached to? Something about spider webs of information. Invisible tentacles attached to things and stuff that I don’t see or understand but might at some future point, need.
Did I mention I hate my OS.
Is it email? Is it a contact? Is it a photo?
The hell with it. I like what I like. Give me the good old days.
Give me technology where I know where every button is. I know what my phone does and I know how it does it.
Leave me alone OS
You wouldn’t go changing the buttons on the box that launches the Nukes every 6 months would you?
Red button use to destroy Russia. Now it’s the green button.
Woops. Where is that new OS again?
Sorry Kremlin.
Hey OS. Go make love to some other fool.
I am not Joaquin Phoenix. I’m not going to dance with you near a merry go round my loins lusting for cyber love.
I’m resistant to your siren’s call.
So I manage to get by in this technologically slick world for weeks on end.
Wow. How do I ever make it on the OS currently powering up my Model A iphone?
I don’t see any North Koreans lurking in the hallway.
There is no cyber bad guy trying to give me a sub sonic wedgie when I am least expecting it.
I only see reasonably reliable telecommunications.
I push send. An email goes someplace. I click answer, some person I don’t want to talk to is on the other end of a crappy little speaker.
I am content in this new millennium of more is more.
I am an enough is enough kind of guy.
I have enough stuff on my iphone to get the job done. It entertains me and honestly, could till the end of days.
“Hello Jesus. Please let me in the Pearly Gates. Yes. Take my iphone with the antiquated OS system.”
“We don’t want that piece of crap,” Jesus Bellows as if I have told him the best joke in the world.
Come on Jesus. Didn’t you know I would hand you an antiquated iphone with a sorry ass OS. But I digress…
How many apps are too many apps? How many work emails do I really need from corporate headquarters?
Enough. Leave an old dinosaur alone. I am happy with OS 6. Is that what we call it? OS 6?
Update your IOS 7 my phone constantly reminds me. UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE.
She is a shrew. She is a bill collector with no conscious.
Leave me alone, OS 7. Leave me alone.
I contemplate filing a restraining order for my iphone.
I wonder if I can get pants pockets wide enough to give me a cyber sanctuary, a ring of protection?
Then the day of reckoning.
Monday, I am forced to make changes I dread.
My email account at my work is changed. My station goes to a new server.
Suddenly, the information stops, like a desert rain shower. It is hot and barren. Nothing in. Nothing out.
It is Armageddon in the new millennium.
The phone pops up message after message asking me for data and passwords and information I don’t have.
I am the evil OS. I have you now, I hear her little voice whisper.
Suddenly, my technological passport is dead.
Where is Grandma’s rotary phone when I need it.
The I.T. people are running from computer to computer like garden weasels.
“Your phone won’t work,” some egg head tells me.
“Why?”
“You need the new operating system,” he says.
“Can’t load it,” I respond. “No place to put it.”
“You need to get rid of something,” he says.
“What?”
“How many pictures do you have?”
I look in my phone. I have 2,000 plus pictures.
I have 3 years worth of pictures. Vegas and Carmel and Memphis and Florida.
Kids and friends and crazy crime scenes. I have video galore. Christmas and downtown events and stupid people in bars.
What to get rid of.
I hate you OS. I hate you.
So I go to my pictures and start erasing pictures. I touch the screens rapidly, angrily, punching each photo. I watch as a red x pops onto the box highlighting it.
I move on, scrolling like a turbulent sea, ripping through tens, hundreds, finally a 1,000 photos.
I am furious. I am Clint Eastwood. I am going to shoot someone this time, I swear to God I’m gonna do it.
Screw you operating system. I’ll show you who owns the new technological millennium.
So I highlight and tap and scroll. I look at rows of pictures collectively, a moment at a time.
A kid. A friend. A bar. A beach.
I act like these pictures belong to the OS
Screw you OS
I’ll take your Christmas photo, there. ha ha.
Oh, you like that fourth of July picture OS. Well too bad. DELETED!
NA NA NA NA.
And so it goes. thousands of pictures blown up, smashed, deleted, ejected into some void of nothingness.
like they never existed.
And for what? to make room for …
I dare i say it?
the New OS 7
ARRRRGGGGHHH.
There is smoke coming out of the ports.
There is steam pouring out of my ears.
Do you want to erase 1,276 photos? stupid OS asks.
F*** you OS.
The engineer lost in his own mind full of cyber stupid looks at me like I am the devil.
I am possessed. A man on a mission.
I push the button: DELETE
The little smart phone goes into technological cardiac arrest for a moment.
Suddenly my photo folder is barren.
It is empty like the cupboard where Goldi Locks lives.
Suddenly I have plenty of room for a new OS
I want to throw my phone against the wall.
I want to see what it looks like when the insides of an OS 7 ooze onto the carpet. Does she bleed red? Is she Satan and her insides are filled with blood sucking creepy crawlers?
The engineer hits a few buttons and a line emerges. I am told my phone is thinking. I am now importing the all new, greatest thing since sliced bread: THE O.S. 7
Where are the trumpets and red carpet to announce it’s download?
20 minutes later it’s over.
It’s like waking up from a colonoscopy.
It hurts to look at, and you’re a little sore.
Do I have cancer? Is my colon clean?
These are my 1st thoughts as I look at the new graphics that saturate the front of my phone.
I HATE YOU, I say aloud to the iphone
A co-worker eyes me suspiciously, perhaps glad I am not wearing a trench coat.
YOU ARE A STUPID OPERATING SYSTEM AND I WISH I HAD NEVER MET YOU.
I sound like a scorned X wife.
The little icons look similar, but they are different.
I punch a button and something I expect to happen, doesn’t.
There are new ways to do old things.
Who invents this? Why do they mess with a good thing? Why is everything different?
Up is now left. Tap a screen is now scroll some hard to find little squiggle thing.
Go to hell OS 7. YOU SUCK.
Texting is different. My contact list is different. My photo library looks like a dresser drawer with all the clothes removed.
Even Serie seems stupider, if that is possible.
I tap the button.
“Serie! I just want you to know that I hate you.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” she says with a cyber voice from sweat shop in Tai Pai.
Now Siri, it is not good. You are not good, my OS is no good.
As Al Pacino might scream “This whole damn situation is No Good.”
OS 7.
No Good.
Life’s Crazy™