I just finished reading a book called THE STORY KEEPER, by Lisa Wingate. It’s a sweet story. Relaxing. With the gentleness that Wingate always brings to her stories.
I call myself The Picture Keeper, because I have ’em. A lot of them!
Tuesday night my brother called to ask if I could round up some pictures of him and our family when he was a child and send them by Express overnight mail to his agent. Why, you ask? Because CBS Sunday Morning is working on a segment about him!! How exciting is that!
I will let you know when it is going to be on tv.
Sure, I said. I’ve been organizing photos for years. I sort, I scan, I store in containers. I have several generations of relatives’ pictures, thanks to my grandmother’s carefully labeled photo albums. In fact, two years ago I’d separated a giant bin of my mother’s photos and assembled a box just for my brother’s childhood photos.
Not that there were a lot of those, because my parents didn’t have a camera and weren’t really interested in taking pictures. Uncle Mac (our great uncle) had a Brownie camera he was very proud of, so I suspect a lot of our pictures came from him. And from whoever took pictures and gave them to us.
So this morning, with my first mug of coffee, I searched through my computer to find photos that I’d already scanned. This would be so easy! I would just email them and not worry about going to the Post Office or Staples.
Or so I thought. Because January 9th, Microsoft had updated my computer to Version 1709. I’d lost my Start menu and my Edge browser. I’d spent a long day trying to counteract it and failed.
I hadn’t realized that I could no longer open my photos. The message “This app can’t open” appeared every single frustrating, infuriating time. Unless it was a recent photo taken by my I-phone, I was out of luck.
I searched for and finally found a dvd of photos I’d made for my mother’s 90th birthday. My computer wouldn’t open that either.
Or my videos.
Okay, I would hook up my scanner and start over.
Nope. It wouldn’t deal with my beloved scanner, either.
Plan C: I would go to my mother’s house and look for the container of photos that belonged to my brother.
Which I did. I selected about fifteen of them, labelled the backs and headed to the Post Office. I hated mailing the originals, but hopefully CBS will be careful with them and will return them.
Mission accomplished. It should have been a simple thing, this rounding up of pictures, but technology failed me. And a box of photos saved the day. And the tv show!
So I will be calling a computer repairman this afternoon and I hope he will say, “I know exactly what you’re talking about it! Bring your computer in and I’ll have it done in a jiffy!”
But in case that little fantasy doesn’t come true, I’ll be off-line for a while as my two-year old computer is restored to its former glory.
Wish me luck. And stay away from Version 1709.
I took a picture of the picture with my phone. Not bad!
