The Update Changed One Thing and It Wasn't the Phone

The notification came through Tuesday evening, new OS, install tonight or be reminded approximately every four hours until you comply. I installed it overnight. By Wednesday morning everything looked almost exactly the same except for two settings I hadn't known existed and one menu that moved somewhere slightly to the left of where I kept reaching.

I spent maybe forty-five minutes Wednesday morning doing the thing where you tap through every screen to locate the difference. Not because anything was broken. More because something felt slightly repositioned, the way furniture does when someone has cleaned and put things back not quite where they were. The phone was fine. The phone was probably better. I put it face-down on the table and drank my coffee and noticed, for the first time in a while, how quiet the kitchen is at that hour.

The specific face of reading a settings menu you didn't ask for.

This is, I think, the actual content of a software update at this point in a phone's life cycle. Not the new features. The forty-five minutes of comparative listening you do before you accept that nothing fundamental has changed. The prints are still leaning against the wall. Gerald's vine is still doing what it's been doing since July. The cord is still on the windowsill. The update happened.

I wrote one draft-folder sentence about it Tuesday night and then another one Wednesday morning after the coffee. This is the second sentence, expanded. That's the whole story.