The other morning I woke up and my phone had changed.

Not broken. Not stolen. Changed. Updated. Improved. The phone had decided, somewhere in the middle of the night, that the current version was no longer adequate and that a better version was available, and it had installed the better version while I was asleep. The better version was now what I had. Nobody had mentioned this was going to happen.

I found out when I tried to find the camera. The camera had lived in the second row, third icon from the left, since February. I pressed the second row, third from the left, and opened the weather. Partly cloudy, high of seventy-one, winds from the southwest. The camera was somewhere else.

This is the update experience. You go to bed with the phone you know and wake up with a phone that knows more than you do. Nobody moves the furniture in the night. The coffee maker is where it always is. But the phone, which is the thing I reach for forty times a day and which I have spent considerable effort learning, had been reorganized by people who were not present for any of that effort. They improved it. The improvements were theirs to appreciate. The disorientation was mine.

Don takes this better than I do. Don is patient by nature and by profession. He was an accountant for forty years, and accountants accept that rules get revised on a schedule. The tax code changes. The form you knew becomes a form you have to learn again. The number goes on a different line this year than it did last year. You note the change and adapt, and you don’t spend time being frustrated about the old version, because the old version is not coming back. Don found the camera on my phone in eleven seconds. He was back in the garage by twelve-fifteen. He said the new layout was actually cleaner. I took this as a kindness.

I’ve been on the wrong side of updates before. The notification situation I’ve written about, and I won’t revisit it in detail, except to note that the update notification is how this particular situation starts. The phone sends a message, at some hour when you are not watching, and asks whether you’d like the new version now or later. You apparently pressed something. This is always how it turns out. This is how I wound up subscribed to Charleston, South Carolina weather for nine months after a trip in October, and it’s how I wound up with a new phone layout on a Wednesday in June.

I don’t object to progress. I have said this before and I mean it and I hope someday to find that I also believe it. The people who designed the update presumably had reasons, and the reasons presumably made sense to them, and progress is a real thing that produces real improvements. But there is a specific experience of progress that nobody has explained: standing in your kitchen at six-forty-five in the morning with your reading glasses on, pressing the second row, third from the left, and finding the weather instead of the camera, and understanding that the three weeks you spent in February learning where things lived have been not erased but gently relocated, which is the same thing with better manners.

The settings moved too. One menu deeper. Kevin says this is where they actually were and I’d been accessing them incorrectly before, which might be true, but it doesn’t explain why the incorrect method worked. Kevin teaches high school history in Columbus and he is used to revisions to the official record. He accepts them. I’m working on it.

The new version has a feature involving photographs. Someone told me about it. I was still looking for the camera at the time, so I don’t have the details, but I’m confident the feature is an improvement.

Don made a small adjustment. He found a little sticker in the office supply drawer and put it on the camera icon so I’d know which one it was. He did this without being asked. He’s been making small adjustments to the surrounding world for fifty-two years, without being asked, until what I’m working with more or less corresponds to how I expect it to work. The phone updates. Don updates in response.

I have been told the next one is scheduled for August.