Analogies don’t always work correctly for a wide variety of reasons.

In fact, using an analogy to compare one situation to another is like comparing left handed hammers to fallopian tubing. 

There’s just no overlap in the Venn diagram.

See what I just did there?

That’s right.  You just experienced a double layered analogy.

Sit back and collect yourself with a deep breath or two while I clean my spectacles. 

Let’s talk about your computer.

You ever notice how after using it awhile, it’s performance begins to degrade?

It becomes slower to start up.  Your internet browser doesn’t fly from one page to another with the speed and agility it once did.  Streaming content gets patchy.  The words you type into your keyboard don’t appear on the screen as fast as they should.  Your email takes forever to load.

The problem is that the degraded performance didn’t happen all at once on some random Tuesday morning.  Instead, all of the bugs, hiccups, and digital flatulence appeared incrementally over a period of time.  This allowed you the user to get use to issues so much so that you barely noticed them.

By the time you did notice them, the issues were so significant that you were ready to trash your computer in favor of purchasing another one.

But before doing that, you thought better of that impulse.  After all, we’re in the digital age.  By now you’ve already owned and operated a plethora of computers ranging from a few desktops, to a handful of laptops complete with a docking station and a multi-monitor set up.

You knew better than just to act on the knee jerk reaction to replace a perfectly good computer, especially because you haven’t experienced the blue screen of death on your current machine.

So instead of gathering the gumption, where-with-all, and funds to go get a new computer, you take to the internet looking for a cleanup utility which will Roto-Rooter your operating system, registry, temporary files, start-up sequences, and a gaggle of other processes so as to restore your machine to its once and former glory.

Certainly the right utility will get the job done, but it’s not a permanent fix.

Insidious bugs born of a variety of circumstances remain in your system.  They endeavor to persevere by reincorporating themselves much in the same way they did before.

It’s cyclical, so on top of leaving guards in place to keep the joint as clean as possible, you also have to periodically go in there and run the clean-up process again just to get rid of some of the crap.

Analogy, you’re up in five.

Some of those residual bugs can be nasty.  They remain invisible to the clean-up utilities and anti-virus protection you have.  Once the environment is optimal, they become self-aware and then hijack control of your life again.

Consider this.

At the beginning of 2017, we installed a clean-up utility that did a better job than we expected.  The utility purged a bunch of crap from the system and caused it to work more efficiently.  The corrections were significant and beneficial.

So much so that the residual bugs sought out ways to adapt and overcome to the effects of the new utility.

It took a few years to get there, but it did.

By the year 2020, our system was still working well due to the highly effective nature of the clean-up utility.  By then, the more insidious elements of the system had identified pathways to reincorporate themselves into the system.

Now, here in 2021, the highly effective clean-up utility has been removed.  The nasty bugs have been archived for future use.  The slow moving bugs have been re-installed so that they can resume the incremental march to slowing us down.

Just like before, we won’t notice until things have gotten bad again.