One morning, my Yahoo Mail wouldn’t load.
Instead, an odd error message flashed on the screen. I did some digging and found an 800 phone number that was supposed to be the Yahoo help desk.
Turned out to be a company trying to get money out of me, but the Yahoo account acted up for a couple of days. I worried my computer had been compromised because of the odd message. My neighbor, Arthur, is a computer whiz, and he offered to check out the system.
By the end of the day, he said the computer was fine but I should change from Yahoo mail to Gmail. My husband had been telling me to switch over for months, but like so many people, I didn’t want to give up the familiar.
Changing what’s comfortable isn’t easy.
I’m comfortable with the familiar.
Checking my email with Yahoo is familiar. There’s a shortcut on my desktop and I can get right to my email in seconds.
The books on the bookshelf are in the same order as when I put them there 10 years ago. I know where they are – why change that up?
The pictures I hung on the family room wall 12 years ago are still in the same place.
My computer sits on the same desk it has for the past 20 years. My son keeps telling me to get a more efficient set up, but that requires one word I try and avoid – change.
My hairstyle is familiar. When Rosie, my friend and stylist, was out for a few weeks, a different stylist cut my hair.
That was a disaster – I couldn’t style my hair the way she had, the cut was too short and the style required using a hair brush in ways I knew I’d never master.
Uncle Ben’s long-grain rice is the only brand I use because my grandmother and my mom used it. I see no reason to change what’s worked for two generations.
I’m not always such a stick in the mud. I change my attitudes and opinions when presented with new information. Being able to check information from a variety of sources is a challenge I enjoy.
But it looked like I was going to have to move out of my comfort zone and do something different with my email.
I grudgingly took my husband’s and Arthur’s advice. I went through all the steps to set up a Gmail account. Trying to hang on to something familiar, I tried using the same email name as I’d been using for the past 20 years.
No go.
Someone had already chosen that name. The names Gmail suggested were too long and, let’s face it, I’d never remember those. After 10 minutes, I finally typed a password Google found satisfactory.
Then there was the next step of setting up a password. I’m awful with passwords. Super secure ones are too long for me to remember and require upper case, lower case, symbols and numbers.
But after 15 minutes, I submitted a password Google found safe and acceptable. I wrote it down and haven’t told Arthur or my husband I committed that email faux pas. I know I’m prone to forgetting passwords, so I followed a familiar routine, hence the reason the password is written down in a book.
When I finished setting up the Gmail account, my husband asked if I wanted a tutorial on storing documents in the cloud and using One-Drive.
Overload, was the word that flashed in my brain.
Until I get an error message or I’m forced, I’ll follow my familiar routine of saving things to an external hard drive and the desktop.
My brain’s tired. I think I’ll pop a tape in the VHS recorder and relax.
Denise’s email is dhadams1955@yahoo.com. Yes, I’ll still check it. Old habits die hard. This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.