Dear Microsoft,

It happened again.  This morning. From 4am-5am, while you slept.

Let me backtrack a bit.

You see, I have a regular job with normal hours.  But every day, my alarm clock goes off at 4am so that can still keep a toe in the world of radio, but getting up at an ungodly hour (I know that for a fact–he doesn’t get up before 5) and go through my morning ritual of scouring the Internet for interesting tidbits and joke fodder that I, in turn, post for subscribers of Radio Online’s “Daily Show Prep.”  I’m not getting rich, it’s more of a passion project.

But make no mistake–I’m tired.  Oh, sure, 4am is much later than the 2:19am I had my alarm clock set for back in the days of morning show radio.  But you just suck the life out of me when I get up, try to use my computer and it’s doing one of those legendary updates.

Sometimes they happen and I’m back up and running in no time.  However, this morning was another one of the “Slap in the Face” (SITF) varieties.  I stared at a screen that had updated, then rebooted…only to see the arrow from the mouse and nothing else.  A black screen, with a function arrow point that I could wave around the screen, but that was it.  So, I rebooted the system, hoping that it might help.  It didn’t.  Three restarts later and I was still waiting.  So, after an hour of this exercise in futility, I went upstairs to get my laptop, the backup plan.

By the time I came back down, there was screen.  And I went to work.

But, as I said, that was an hour later than normal.  An hour of precious time I lost simply because you chose to update something.  Maybe a short note, explaining what the update is and how long I should expect this to take.  That would give me the option to do my work, then perform the update when I’m gone for the day and don’t need my machine.

Just an out-of-the-box thought.

Oh and by the way, this isn’t the first time this has happened.  Oh, no.

Thanks for your consideration.

Tim Hunter