Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Having Issues But Need to Keep it in Perspective

For about two weeks, every time I open up a Word document, I’ve gotten a message stating that my subscription is about to expire and that I need to reactivate it. I’d click on the box saying “reactivate” and various options would come up, the cheapest being $69.99 a year. What? Didn’t we buy Microsoft Word when we bought the laptop last year? When I dug out the paperwork, it clearly stated that a one year subscription came with the purchase. How is that possible? The program is on my laptop. How is it just going to go away in a year.

Well, it did. Or at least the ability to do anything with all those documents did. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of files and stories and blog posts and poems and recipes and everything which is saved in that laptop. I just don’t get it. Even files which I wrote previously in a different version of Word have now been sucked into the Word 2016 abyss and though I can view them, I can’t make any changes to them.

So, as I was dealing with all of that last night, I realized that a blog post just was not going to happen today. Yet, here I am this morning, typing this saga into the living room desktop.
I have a few options – pay the $69.99 to be allowed the honor of using Word for another twelve months (and then pay again), or pay $149.99 to be granted perpetual use of Word (with no yearly updates, whatever that is). I’ve thought about trying to put Word 2010, which is on the desktop on the laptop. Or just saying the heck with it. I know there are other options besides Word, but I don’t have the time to figure them out now. I’m regretting donating my Smith Corona to Goodwill years ago.

Why does technology have to be so difficult? And expensive? I haven’t done anything about this yet. My son seems to think he can solve my problems and get me back up and running for cheap. We’ll see.


Hope you are having a better week than I am. Also, I’m trying to keep my first-world problems in perspective. Will keep you posted.  

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