The ad for the new Windows 10 operating system was charming enough. Adorable, bald-headed babies grinning toothlessly while the voiceover rhapsodised about what they’ll be able to do by the time they’re able to use a computer, by dint of the new Windows 10. In the near future, a smile, apparently, would suffice instead of a password. And I imagined my own gap-toothed grin opening portals online to a world previously unknown. I don’t usually concern myself about such technical changes; that’s usually left for my computer guy Leon. But I admit it. I got caught up and decided to swap my old operating system for the new.

Oh, how I now rue that decision.

Weirdly, I’m not a Luddite. True, I don’t often readily embrace the digital innovations of today but it’s not because I fear them. My issue is that they’re being foisted on us too fast and too furious, you know. Jeez. Today we hear that something’s the Next Big Thing. Then, by the time we’ve wrapped our head around that, a week later, something else has replaced it and is now the Next Big Thing. This is, of course, while the Last Big Thing is still on the way to us, bubble-wrapped from Amazon.com. Hell, I remember the halcyon days when my father’s 8-track record player was the Next Big Thing. And it stayed that way for a long time, too. I also have a memory of when I first became aware that the cassettes that eventually replaced Daddy’s 8-track would be replaced by objects called compact discs. If it seems a long time ago, it’s because it actually was: a Millennial colleague recently observed me with a CD I’d recently purchased from Amazon and the shock was palpable when he remarked, “Wow. You still buy music? Like, OMG, who does that still?”

I can’t stress enough how envious I am of today’s youth who, being born during this particular time continuum, are oblivious to the twin concepts of bonding and putting down roots. Constantly having to confront life’s brutishly feckless nature is almost enough to drive some of us of my generation into a permanent foetal position. Everything is so impermanent — the sand shifts beneath our feet all the time — but Millennials handle this with remarkable aplomb. Not so us Gen-Xers. We hang on for dear life, the thought of change bringing more than its fair share of consternation. For God’s sake, one of the longest relationships I’ve ever had with a person or thing was with my first BlackBerry, which I had for more than five years. And even when it became obvious that it was in my best interest to separate from it because it wasn’t treating me the way I ought to be treated, like a true girl, I dug my heels in. Today, if you have a phone for two years, that’s seen as real commitment.

Windows 10, it has emerged, is a fresh hell that, over the last few weeks that I’ve installed it, has made my life an existential nightmare I hope those little bald-headed suckers never live to experience. One of the major problems, Leon theorises, is the appearance of all those little panels which only serve to slow the computer down. And on my laptop that, let’s face it, is almost four years old and therefore, by computer standards, antiquated, means I need two times the amount of hours I needed previously to do the same amount of work. Forget about Skype, which I can access but not while concurrently opening a file in say, My Documents, and for which, depending on how urgently I need it, I might have to hang up from Skype to access.

Talk about “fiddling with the equipment”, a term which, let’s just say, once upon a time conjured up a whole different, ahem, scenario.

“Can’t I just press a button and return to Windows 8?” I wailed. Long-suffering Leon, bless his heart, having put up with my varied techie neuroses and challenges over the years, smiled his usual beatific smile and replied unctuously, “That’s not how progress works.”

Silly Sharon. Silly, simple, 20th century-craving Sharon.

(Some food for thought here, though: just how much smarter can gadgets get? And if we accept that they can go the nth degree, then, how dumb are we to become in our reliance on them?)

After the man hours lost running up and down with my laptop last week, in the name of progress, I’m tempted to repeat a quote from the novelist Philip Roth here: Firetruck the laudable ideologies.

(‘Firetruck’ of course being a euphemistic nomenclature utilised by the brilliant former Trinidad Express columnist BC Pires when saltier language was absolutely, positively required but his readers’ and the newspaper censors’ Victorian sensibilities absolutely, positively had to be considered.)

After Leon disabled something in the brain of my computer and I was finally able to get back online, he assured me the new system will grow on me.

Maybe he is right. After all, if 21st-century advertising and product placement are to be believed, then all we need in this life is progress. An ever-expanding wardrobe, an increasingly flashier car, and a constantly updated computer. But so much more, though. Add to that a phone that also doubles as a personal vibrator incapable of contributing a yeast infection, a drawer full of La Perla G-string panties that cost more than the country’s GDP, and an exotic cross-breed dog complete with Kim Kardashian moue AND bleached anus.

You know, the bare necessities.

In 1984 when cellphones were first mass marketed, did anybody, Kodak included, think that there’d come a day when a phone had to double as a camera? Yet, increasingly our devices are being required to multi-task because those mono-functional days have gone the way of wine and roses. What will be the last frontier? When, I sometimes ask myself, will enough be enough?

No time soon, apparently. Change is a freight train from which you simply have to get out of the way or risk being mowed down. This makes me very anxious, I’ll admit. And it’s reflected in this recurring nightmare from which I usually wake drenched in cold sweat. This is the scenario:

I go to the ladies’ counter in a fine department store and encounter the snooty shop girl, who’s one of those who’re scornful of any full-figured gal whose BMI seems to have eaten her IQ for lunch… and dinner.

Me (wearing my best RBF): I’d like to see your nicest bras, please.

Her (wearing her best RBF, and sighing): What, um, size are you?

Me: Ahem, just point me in the general direction, will you.

Her: OK, ma’am. (Ma’am? When the hell did I become a ma’am? But OK, whatevs.) Will that be smart brassieres that come equipped with Google Maps and can tell time and whether or not you’re ovulating?

Lord, first it was Dolly the sheep. Then that freaky Star Trek hologram business at Obama’s first inauguration. I don’t know about you, but smart brassieres are where I draw the line. It’s all entirely too much. And yet, isn’t it possible that this is where we’re headed?

Still, I’ll concede it’s not all bad. I remember scoffing at the concept of reading devices in the past. Oh, I would never buy one, I sniffed. Today, however, nothing fills me with as much perverse joy as the knowledge that I can read my tons of books and watch tons of TV — my two favourite pastimes — on a single machine that I can toss in a bag and take anywhere. I’ve come to sincerely believe that, despite my bellyaching sometimes, I’m part of civilisation’s finest hour.

That’s progress for you, I guess.

Now, about those laudable ideologies…

When the Founding Fathers penned that numinous document called the Declaration of Independence that stated, in part, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equally,” by history’s account, the detritus hit the fan and western civilisation was thrown on its ear and onto the horns of a psychological dilemma. Slavery, up until then, remember, was an establishment believed to be divinely sanctioned by God and the Church itself; it was practically Apocrypha. But here’s an upshot: all these years later, a sovereign nation called Jamaica exists, demonstrating to the world, as recently as last month at the World Championships, that we’re among the best in the world.

So recent newsmaker Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis’s defiance in denying same-sex couples marriage licences, even despite the recent ruling of the Supreme Court, is really a tempest in a teacup. In the same way that America, more than half-a-century after Martin Luther King’s now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech, has a black president, people of different sexual identities will have their day. This is no longer the dawning of the Age of Aquarius; we’re living in the time of “I am Cait”.

Embracing change is simply a mindset. It requires one to relinquish the control one has on the order one has established for one’s life, on one’s world. Having installed Windows 10, it was disorienting to wake up the following morning unable to make sense of the world I’d known up until the day before; in other words, the old operating system I knew in my sleep. Would my refusing to let go of Windows 8 change anything? Abso-firetrucking-lutely not. Sometime soon, I’ll be obliged to buy a new computer when my current one becomes obsolete, and it will be retrofitted with Windows 10. Such is the nature of progress. It’s the currency that keeps this old world moving toward becoming the entity it must eventually be.

For true progress to be effected, constant changes to our operating systems — literally and figuratively — need to be made. Change is messy, it’s disorienting; nobody likes it because it challenges our need for comforting chimeras.

But, make no mistake, with or without us, it will occur.