On the Indignity of the Software Update

There are, in the life of a gentleman, perhaps three occasions on which he may be forgiven for weeping: the death of a loyal hound, the marriage of a beloved daughter, and the morning his telephone announces, without having once consulted him, that it has "refreshed the experience." I did not ask to be refreshed. I was, prior to the refreshment, a man at the very summit of his contentment, and I had the summit furnished exactly as I liked it.

I will begin with the button. There was, for years, a button. It lived in the lower right corner of the screen, where I could find it in the dark, by feel, the way a sailor finds the rail of a ship he has served on since boyhood. That button and I had an understanding. I pressed it; it did the thing; neither of us made a fuss. Then, overnight, and while I slept the sleep of the trusting, it was taken from its corner and moved to the top, where buttons go to hide from responsibility. In its place they have installed a second button, which does something else, and which I have pressed four hundred times by accident and once, gloriously, on purpose, whereupon it did the first thing, as if to taunt me.

They call this progress. I have looked into the matter, as I look into all matters, which is to say deeply and with a magnifying glass I keep for the purpose, and I can report that it is not progress. Progress is a bridge where there was a river. This is a man moving your furniture while you are at dinner and leaving a note that reads "we've made some improvements." (I have the note. I am framing it, beside the one from the previous update, which promised the very same.)

As I established last spring, in a lecture delivered chiefly to my own reflection, the entire enterprise rests on a single unexamined assumption: that a thing which works is, for that very reason, unfinished. No cathedral was ever completed by this logic. No marriage. The men who build these updates would look upon the Sistine ceiling, pronounce the lighting "legacy," and ship a version in which the finger of God has been relocated, for consistency, to a submenu.

(I should say, before my apostrophe says it for me, that I am not a man who fears change. I have changed a great deal in my life. I have changed my mind about the semicolon, to which I am now happily married, and about the umbrella, and about mushrooms, twice, within a single meal. I revised my entire philosophy of window blinds on a Tuesday and revised it back by Thursday, and no one had to release a note. Change I can manage. It is being changed, without consent, in the night, by a company in another hemisphere, that I object to, and I object to it, I believe, with the whole of my remaining strength.)

And then, this morning, it happened. I found the button.

They had not hidden it after all. They had merely moved it somewhere better. It sits now at the top, larger, kinder, lit in a gentle blue, and reaching it asks of me a small upward motion that adds, I am told by people who measure such things, years to a life. I pressed it. It did the thing. It did the thing beautifully. And I sat back in my chair, a changed man, and understood that I had been wrong, wholly and audibly wrong, and that the update was not a theft but a gift, and that I would defend it now to anyone, chief among them the version of myself who wrote the paragraphs above, whom I no longer know and would not seat at my table.

There is, I concede, one small outstanding matter. In the course of finding the button I appear to have changed my ringtone to something the settings describe as "Cosmic Shimmer," enlarged my text to a size legible from orbit, and enrolled, by a route I cannot now retrace, in a newsletter about boats. I do not own a boat. I am, as of this morning, extremely interested in boats. The experience, in short, has been refreshed, and so, it would seem, have I.

I shall write and complain. I have already begun the letter. I am ageing it in the drafts folder, like a cheese, until I am certain what I think, which will be, if history is any guide, the opposite of all this, by lunch.

Firmly, and until further notice,

Mr Fickle