It's a
painful thing when a close
friend suddenly becomes
distant,
uncommunicative, and even visibly
uncomfortable around you for no apparent reason. There was a stretch of time where this happened to my wife and I several times, with people who acted like our
best friends in the world on one day and then treated us like
strangers the next. When we tried to talk to them about what was going on, we were met with transparently
false cheer: "Don't be silly! Nothing's wrong! Everything's fine!"
In an effort to deal with these mysterious freezings-out, I attempted to apply the principles I'd learned as a network administrator to try and troubleshoot the problem.
First, I had to ask myself: when was the last time this friendship worked? What, if anything, has changed since then? This was sometimes hard to answer for certain, since in some cases there were other friendships running in the background to which I didn't have access. In one case I was forced to conclude that one or more of them was conflicting with the normal operation of our friendship, but this would remain speculation as long as the user continued to withold critical information.
In at least one instance an upgrade to my life's operating system seemed to be causing the problem as it unexpectedly conflicted with their own. There was of course the option to do a rollback, but I considered this upgrade essential to my stability and security.
Frankly, all I have to say to that is, if you're going to continue to rely on an antiquated, hopelessly buggy OS, and you won't even consider a patch to make it compatible to mine so we can continue to share valuable data across the network, then you totally deserve to crash, man! SCREW YOU!!
Or I would say that, except it sounds kinda dorky now that I read it over.