Windows! Driving me nuts!

My company uses an in-house designed calendar/scheduling application. We use it to book meetings, conference calls, vacation time, everything. We’ve been using it for years and it works great.

In two weeks we’re junking most of it in favor of Google Calendar. I’m okay with the move. The transition is going to be annoying, but I’ve been using Calendar pretty much since Google released it and I know my way around pretty well.

One thing our app does is push notifications onto the Windows desktop. Five minutes before a meeting starts we get a little pop up box on the lower right corner of the screen and it stays there until you either click it off, or five minutes after the meeting’s start time.

Google Calendar has a similar function. In our early testing it would sometimes show up in the browser window and sometimes on the desktop. I think someone was tweaking our system under the covers because now it’s always on the desktop. Weird. For me, it was disappearing after a few seconds though. That isn’t good. If that notification goes away as soon as it displays, I’m going to end up being late for a lot of meetings. I mentioned it at our daily group meeting today and everyone seemed to have a different experience. Some aren’t getting it at all, some are only getting it for a few seconds, and some are seeing it stick around for a while.

Well… it’s gotta be a Windows thing then, right? I’m not anywhere close to what you’d call a power user on Windows 10, but I can usually fake my way around. I brought up the notification settings to see if there is a way I can change the length of time a notification displays. Nope. Nothing. Well that doesn’t make sense. I spent a good 10 minutes clicking around trying to find this parameter setting that I know should be there, while admitting that it might not actually exist.

Eventually… off to The Google. The notification parameter wasn’t under notifications, it was under display. Muthapussbucket! I set it to five minutes, which is the max, even though I was hoping to set it to 10 minutes. It worked.

I feel Windows dumb. Of course the notification setting was not under notifications! Of course! Dummy.

I’m not sure how this relates to being stir crazy due to COVID-19, but the two things have to be connected somehow. Everything connects back to The ‘Rona.