My Battle with Otto.

Today I spent the whole day in an eternal (intentional misuse of this word for emphasis and/or drama) struggle between myself and the Windows Automatic Updates auto restart dialog box. Mac users may not appreciate this story unless I elaborate so I'm going to take a minute to fill them in:

What happens is that Windows Automatic Update, which for the duration of this post will be referred to as "Otto" (get it?...sorry), downloads something automatically and then pops up and says, "Hey, if you want this thing that I downloaded, which you didn't even know about to work properly, I need to move some bits around for a minute and you're not allowed to see what I'm doing, so I'm going to have to shut down Windows to do it." 

Today's battle with "Otto" goes like this:

I respond, "But I don't want to stop doing the unimportant things that I've been doing such as watching my computer defragment the hard drive and checking the Internet to make sure everything's still there and coming up with this idea for this post. If I stop even for 5 minutes I will lose all trains of thought and have to start all over."

Otto understands that I might be doing something when he pops up so he says "Ok, I will give you 15 minutes to notice me." Sooo needy. But then he gets impatient. "If you can't bother to acknowledge me within 15 minutes then it's f-you b*tch, I will f*ck up your sh*t whether you have stuff to save or not and then maybe if you go through your internet browser history you can remember everything you were looking at when you were too busy to pay attention to me!!!" Otto tends to speak in run-on sentences.

So I say oooook I can see you have some issues so how about we click "Restart Later" and everyone wins. Right? WRONG!

Otto agrees to come back later but he's feeling neglected. He doesn't want to be clingy but he's been hurt before and just can't help himself.  So within minutes he's back! "Hey, I'm back! I want to move those bits around without you watching and I'm feeling anxious so can I just do that now?" 

But now I'm annoyed. "I told you to back-off, Otto. We agreed you would come back at a better time so why are you back now?" 

"I thought maybe now was a good time...?"

"I'ts been like 5 MINUTES!!! You know what? You can just wait there. Yeah, wait there and count down alllll the way from 15 minutes. And THEN! Just when you think your time has come, I'm going to send you away! That way I only have to pay attention to you every 20 minutes instead of every 5!"

"If you're going to do that, then I'm going to taunt you by counting up with these little blue rectangles so that you don't forget that I'm waiting!"

"Well, FINE!"

"FINE!" Otto's immaturity really shows when he fights.

Then we don't talk for a while. I wait till the counter gets close to zero, click 'Restart Later,' Otto pops back up to see if it's time and since it never is, the cycle continues for hours. 

Why can't he just let me promise that I will restart when I'm good and ready? The battle rages on as I write this, and it will not soon be over.  However, I will persevere and will  come out victorious. 

Currently Otto is keeping his distance but he will be back. And just to show him how much stronger I am, I will refuse to 'Restart Now' when I'm done playing with my computer. Instead I'll say, "Don't worry, it's almost time but go away will I do this one thing." And then BAM! I'm just going to shut my computer down. And Otto will rue the day he tried to best me, Master of the Internet!