COV81D-19

Today was one of those days where you feel like you're swimming through molasses the whole time and nothing is going as fast as you want it to.

Technology--naturally--was my biggest nemesis today.

Because my job and Zoom are my two pandemic overlords, they decided to work together over the weekend and today to make things hard for me.

It started yesterday when I was trying to launch my family Zoom call. (Since the quarantine started, my siblings and my parents have been chatting on Sunday via Zoom. I had set up last week's scheduled chat and was trying to launch it when I got an error dialogue pop up window telling me that I needed to update my program to a newer version. I initially thought it might be a phishing attempt since I had been using Zoom for the last several weeks at work with no problems at all. But I couldn't get the update to install and we had to quickly pivot (workspeak!) to a different solution to get the family call up and running quickly. All of that worked out and I made a mental note to check Zoom again today once I started doing work.)

This morning I didn't react quickly enough and had to pivot again for my work-related team status. And so what else could I do but launch "Teams" to get THAT meeting done. But I limped my way through it and then quickly reported the need for a Zoom update through my company's service IT portal. 

When I heard from a service person who was able to help, I only had a little over an hour before my NEXT Zoom meeting this afternoon. And while I did get help updating some overdue Windows platform fixes, those updates DID NOT fit my Zoom issue. So I had to download the Zoom app onto my phone and slink my way into this afternoon's department meeting with no video capability and viewing information through my small phone screen. Not optimal!

Luckily, my helpful IT representative had said he would check back in on me this afternoon to see if the Windows update solved me problem. And when he called me back, we was able to remote connect into my laptop and update Zoom accordingly.

So . . . here's hoping that for the rest of my Zoom meetings this week and over the weekend--not to mention for many, many months to come--I'm all up-to-date and ready to go.

Still, navigating through these problems isn't so much like swapping out some futuristic circuits in Star Trek and more like . . .