Mornings are spent updating the blogs, the finances, the emails, etc. Usually it doesn't take very long unless it's a time for reconciliations or I've done a really big shopping day or all my friends have decided to email me en-mass.
   Scottish Power recently decided we weren't giving them enough money, monthly, to cover our vast expenditure of gas usage, meaning it sure as heck been cold here lately! I like being warm so that means turning up the boiler to heat the radiators to heat the cavernous house that I love renting. It should have been a quick little "open and change the amount" fix to my scheduled transactions on Quicken. I open them once or twice a month to enter the regular monthly expenditures such as rent, utilities, mortgage, insurance, etc. This morning it was not to be.
    First try, open scheduled transactions, nothing happens. After a minute, I hit a couple of mouse clicks and the whole Quicken crashes. Grrr, Argh, as Josh Whedon would say, and one of my favorite sayings when working with computers - which my husband fondly reminds me that "computers are our friends!". Second try, same thing, crashes Quicken. Reboot the whole system. Third try, open Quicken, open scheduled transactions, nothing happens, wait longer, hit the mouse, crash Quicken!!!! GRRRR ARGH. Now I call out for help, "Honey!" Ok, it wasn't much of a call as he was sitting right next to me at his computer but he did come up and walk over to see what was happening.  
     "Have you ..." "Yes, or course, you always tell me to do that. I've done it!" He proceeds to check the magical computer things that he knows to check and that he always shows me but never works for me. Reboot again. Open Quicken, open scheduled transactions, Quicken crashes. In all, we must have gone through the same scenario a dozen times but now we are including his magical checks of the system and processes and such but nothing is working.  We are now also including looking up for old backups and there are about a million and a half backups on my computer and I haven't a clue what any of them are or if they are any good now or not. In a massive fit of pique, I delete all backups that don't have a year end date of them and start labeling with something that makes sense to me, not Quicken!   I do manage to open a fairly recent backup and print out my scheduled transaction list so that I have it in case I need to re-enter it.
    Hubby is looking on his computer and he finds something new to try. We go to the file and have it validate the quicken that we are using. It says it found 20 errors in the scheduled transactions. All Right. Getting somewhere. Well, NO. it found them but I think that's all it did. found them and validated them and knows they are there but didn't fix them or delete them or anything. Back to where we started. Open Quicken, Open Scheduled Transactions, Try to do anything, Crash Quicken. slumped shoulders, heavy sigh, head in hands, curses out the ying yang, Grrr, Argh times 1000.
    The other day, on our banking website, I noticed it said that it would not be supporting Quicken 2009 after a certain date. I looked and saw that my Quicken was 2007. Wow, I really haven't been keeping up with the new ones. Not that I ever needed anything like 2009 because I don't tend to download anything from the internet onto my Quicken but instead just put in my own figures, trusting them more than some high school graduate entering figures as she/he tries to stay awake at the bank where they have a minimum paying job. But it occurred to both of us that maybe it was time to upgrade to a new Quicken. Not only will the banks stop supporting it but it has been our experience that the manufacture tends to stop supporting products after 3-5 years too (depending on the product) and anything that has now gone wrong with our Quicken is probably wrong to stay and won't fix itself. AND it is now past lunch and what should have taken me 5 minutes has now taken me several hours and still isn't working.
   Onto Intuit and look at the new Quickens and there's one for 2012! Glorious. I can download it too and only pay - grr argh. But we bit the bullet and bought it and now, happy to say, I have updated my scheduled transaction to take into account my lavish use of power and to keep Scottish Power happy. This is what happens to my mornings sometimes!