When John from accounting placed a call to the local IT helpdesk yesterday, the technician on duty thought they had finally encountered the IT equivalent of a haunted house—a computer that just wouldn’t take a hint.
John explained, rather exasperated, that his computer was relentlessly popping up messages asking, “Can I update now?” over and over again. The messages, he added, appeared almost hourly, smiling brightly from the corner of the screen as though waiting for his enthusiastic approval. “It’s like the thing has turned into a really polite, but very needy, toddler at storytime,” he reported.
The assigned technician, Mike, arrived at John’s desk fully prepared for the standard update override routine. However, once logged in, Mike was baffled. The computer was indeed polite—a little too polite. Each message began, “Excuse me, I was just wondering, if it’s not too much trouble, could I update now? Pretty please?” Mike could almost hear the tiny voice pleading beneath the pixelated message box.
Growing suspicious that this was some kind of new update on the “annoyance scale,” Mike dug deeper into the system settings. After poking around for several minutes, he discovered an obscure, recently patched bug referred to internally as the “Eager Beaver” update prompt. It made the update notifier not only persistent but imbued it with an AI personality programmed to be irresistibly courteous—so much so that users felt genuinely bad about declining.
Mike jokingly tried to reason with the machine, “Look, you’re very sweet, but please stop asking so much,” but the update box responded with an automated, “I understand, but my circuits get lonely when I’m ignored.”
After consulting with a bewildered development team, the fix was simple: a quick patch to dial down the polite pestering to a more manageable once-a-day nudge.
John said goodbye to his super-courteous computer and promised to accept updates on a timely basis—if only to stop feeling guilty every time the screen flashed its digital puppy eyes. Meanwhile, Mike updated the helpdesk logs succinctly: “Resolved issue of overly polite update prompt before we all get emotionally attached.”