I was working on my article this morning and was really cracking away at nailing down some quotes from an interview when, for the third time in four days, everything dissolved on my screen. Microsoft Word faded away, icons on my desktop disappeared like the stars at dawn and then the desktop was replaced by a screen that informed me “Windows is configuring some updates (again) so whatever little unimportant thing you are working on is going to have to wait. And, honey, get me a cup of coffee while you’re just sitting around, okay?” I ignored the rude request for coffee and sat while it hummed, processed, shut down, started up, hummed and processed some more and finally returned me to my desktop, my icons, and my article which was, just like the last two times, completely saved and ready to go again. It was fine—annoying, but fine. But I worry. So I dug out my backup hard drive and hooked it up. I use this backup on both our family computer and my personal laptop, and when I use it on the family computer, it gets right to work, no problem, autorun everything. Whenever I plug it into my computer, I get a variety of conflicting options on the possibilities of how the backup could be run. It isn’t uncommon for me to have to have to trial and error my way through it all because it looks different every time, and then I have to give the devices a few minutes to get rolling to even know if what I tried was a winner so it is time-consuming which is NEVER frustrating at all. I got it running (yay!) and then found that there was an update for the backup hard drive that was waiting to be downloaded. Cripes, not again. I mean, yes, of course I’d love to download the update for the best possible security and performance. Download, unzip, water the plants, check, nothing is happening, click unzip again, agree to let the program change things on my hard drive, start install wizard, blindly agree to end-user license agreement (I sold my soul and all my children by blindly agreeing to iTunes EULAs years ago, what else have I got to lose?) start install (didn’t I already do that? No?) Huh, look at that. The backup ran while I was trying to download the update software. Now I can get back to…what was I doing again?