Upgrade The Download Staircase

You cannot make this stuff up.

The practice management software my customer, Flemco - The Ear, Nose & Throat Specialists, uses to manage their business wasn't running up-to-par, so they asked me to stop down and find out what's up.

I discovered that a software update needed to be downloaded.

However it was a very large download, and until you spend upwards of thousands of dollars a month on bandwith so your modem - that little box that connects your computer to the outside world by sucking a monthly fee out of your wallet - is attached to the equivalent of a sewer pipe rather than a straw, the update would take several hours to download. So the download was started up after the office was closed down.

Then once the update was downloaded and the office was shut down for the afternoon, I updated the server - which is the big kahuna machine that all the other computers in the office talk to.

However, after updating the software with the download, it said it needed to be updated!

So I updated the updated software.

Apparently the update for the update was downloaded with the update I had downloaded.

The reason the updated software needed to be updated, was because the company that lets you download the update - which is a very up-to-date method for keeping your software updated - does not email its customers updates to let them know that there is an update that needs to be downloaded. This does not help customers keep up with what's going down.

So once I updated the updated software on the server with the update I'd downloaded, I was ready to update the software on the workstations with the same update I had downloaded. However, just like the server, once the workstation software was updated, it too needed to be updated because the company that provides the download of the update hadn't kept their customers up-to-date on the updates that needed to be downloaded. So I updated the update that I had downloaded 14 more times.

Are you following this?

Now the update and the update of the update that I had downloaded worked on all but 3 machines - where the downloaded update to update the update that I had downloaded was mismatched to the update that had updated the update to the server and 11 other computers - which were from the same (original) download.

This required me to uninstall the updated software, restart the PC and then re-install the update that had been downloaded in order to update the update that was downloaded from the software company that didn't email updates to their customers to keep them up-to-date about downloading their updates.

Now because the updated software was mismatched to the update and needed to be uninstalled and re-installed so the downloaded update could be updated, nothing was "remembered" by the uninstalled and re-installed update that needed to be updated - which I had gotten from the same (original) download that had updated the server and the other machines. So once the updated updated software was up and running on the 3 machines whose update of the update was mismatched to the update I'd downloaded, it needed to rescan all 17,000 plus entries in the database to update itself.

Very confusing.

So. . .

On my way up the road to get to my home down the hill, I pulled up to my favorite spirits shop, Bottoms Up, Down The Hatch, to update my single malts so that when I got home, I could
start a download.