“Installation Complete”
June 3, 2008. Thanks, Microsoft, for reminding me that "meaning" resides not in words, but in the people who use them.
My laptop, which is about a year old, runs Windows Vista Home Premium. And, while PC manufacturers have been advertising "Windows Vista with Service Pack 1" for a couple of months now, Microsoft has been pushing out the SP1 update to existing chumps, I mean users, like me on a somewhat slower timetable.
Yesterday must have been my lucky day, as "Windows Update” – which I have configured to automatically check for updates every morning at 3 am – finally informed me that SP1 was available. I anxiously clicked on the "install update" button and then watched the little green status bar get bigger and bigger, like Pinocchio's nose, as Windows announced its steady progress while first "downloading update" and then again while "installing update."
About 40 minutes of broadband time later, Windows gleefully announced "Installation Complete", and I was prompted to click another button to restart my computer. I dutifully clicked. My laptop whirred. The screen went momentarily blank as Vista’s user interface closed. A rather surprising (and ominous) announcement then appeared:
Installing Service Pack. Stage 1 of 3 – 0% complete.
Do not turn off your computer.
Zero percent complete? Stage one? What about the last 40+ minutes that my PC has been buzzing and whirring and tying up my broadband connection? What about Microsoft’s Pinocchio, who had just declared, in no uncertain terms, that installation of the update was, past tense, “complete”? What were those 40+ minutes anyway, stage "0" of 3?
Maybe "installation complete" really means "installation 'substantially' complete" I mused. I am, after all, a securities lawyer – people pay me to quibble with others over the definition of plain English terms – so this adjustment in truth seemed plausible.
Not so. In Windows-speak, “installation complete” apparently means its polar opposite: “installation beginning.” I know this because, as I saw the “% complete” number tick upward at an ever-so-glacial pace, I glanced at a clock to record the time. It was a little after 3:00 pm, and I decided to spend the next hour or so doing real work instead of staring at my computer screen and watching Vista act out a modern-day version of The Little Train that Could – “I think I can, I think I can ….”
Back at my desk at around 4:15 pm, I found Vista still chugging along – “I know I can, I know I can” – now having finished 98 percent of stage one. Forget about stages two and three. Vista had not even begun to climb those hills yet, and the warning not to power down my computer – an justifiable act of cyber mercy if there ever were such a thing – still glared menacingly at me from the center of my computer screen.
Disgusted and without options to hasten Vista’s progress, I threw up my hands, muttered an oath, and did what any sane mortal would do: I walked out the door, down the street, and into the corner pub, where I ordered a vodka tonic.
In hindsight, none of this should have surprised me. Microsoft is, after all, the company that once taught me to click “Start” to turn off my computer. Now, thanks to this refresher course from Messrs. Gates and Ballmer, I also know that (i) “installation complete” really means “installation beginning” and (ii) “do not turn off your computer” is just Windows-speak for “go have a cocktail.”
© 2008 by Mark Kelley Braswell, all rights reserved.
