“Remoted” – Day 535 (Thursday)

Me. A lot lately.
Thanks Very Finnish Problems.

Today started out annoying. This was layered atop my new normal baseline of simmering anger and annoyance, which replaced the old new normal of feeling completely dead inside. Progress? We’ll see. There is actually a delightful Finnish word for this, "vitutus," which makes me feel approximately one degree better about it. 

Work is moving to a new authentication step and there was a long email this morning about it and what to do to prepare for some other changes coming soon. The changes are good overall, but require the downloading of an app, which for me was bad. Very, very bad.

My phone storage is full. It has been for a while, and for a couple months, alerts appear that some functions may not work. There was already one app loaded that is required for one work task done occasionally, and, according to the info on the phone, 90 other apps. Most of the apps came with the phone or randomly appeared after phone updates, but when I tried to get rid of many of them, there was an error message that other functions may not work correctly. Pray tell, why are there “Google Input” apps for Indic, Japanese, Korea, Pinyin, Zhuyin? No idea. But efforts to disable (there is no uninstall option) deliver an error message about “other apps may no longer function as intended.” What other apps? What functions? It’s the same scenario for many of the other apps. It might just be a scare tactic. Or not. I don’t know. 

What is this?

The ongoing full storage situation prevented downloading the new mandatory app, which required clearing space. I deleted several apps, including Yahoo News, which I actually use daily. Well, it's now “used.” It wasn’t enough. I deleted some photos. It wasn’t enough. I finally sucked it up and deleted Woodoku, the only game on the phone and the primary portable tool that let me slip into a mostly mindless state that crowded out active thought and emotion for the past rotten and awful weeks since losing my brother and then Moose.

The Woodoku sacrifice to the digital gods finally created enough space for the stupid required app. It also made me want to throw the phone onto the floor and stomp on it like a cartoon character. I pouted and sulked instead, which is much less expensive. A new phone is not in the budget, especially after the recent purchases of a vehicle and new water tank. Even when royally miffed, I can still manage to be practical.

Once the app was loaded, a trip back through older emails was required to find an earlier tutorial about linking the app to the work stuff. The entire nonsensical process occupied a gigantic chunk of the morning, which, in addition to having to make personal sacrifices on my personal phone for a work thing, kind of pissed me off. A lot. After the lengthy morning diversion, it was time to get busy with actual work, and the day improved markedly with more easily accomplished tasks.

Now that the app is on the phone and my one game is gone, all I can say is, I better need that stinking app all day every danged day.