A Letter.
Dear Lads of Microsoft,
I have been a customer for many a year… indeed, for nearly as many years as I’ve been alive. Over these days, weeks, months and so on, I believe I have been pretty understanding. When Windows spontaneously ceased to work, I reinstalled the platform. When core programs mysteriously went missing, I hunted them down. When programs that had previously exhibited no difficulties inexplicably crashed, I took it in stride and good humour and reinstalled them or simply resigned myself to a life without them and put them out of my mind.
Through thick and through thin I have remained loyal. Through every virus, Trojan, and worm I have maintained a degree of understanding. I put up with your less-than-enthusiastic support staff when they were fluent in English, and I put up with being patched through a fuzzy reception to someone in the darkest depths of God-knows-where when you hit upon the miracle of outsourcing. I have dealt with, I believe, quite a lot from your company over the years and I’ve cut you an awfully large slice of slack.
So as you might imagine, I’d like a bit of reciprocation, or at least an idea that doesn’t-how should I put it?-blow.
Whichever cretin developed the idea to spontaneously restart computers, I certainly hope you’ve since moved them to your software development centres so that they may be among men and women of similar intelligence. When I step away from my computer for half-an-hour, it would be much appreciated if I did not return to my computer to find all of my work relegated to the ether-never to be found again.
Allow me to explain. I stepped away from my computer for a phone call, and when I happened to step back I found an impossibly cheerful message informing me that my computer had just updated itself and had to restart-resulting in massive data loss.
“Cor,” I thought to myself, “That must have been an extremely important update to have warranted the unprompted restart of my computer! I wonder what’s changed.”
I logged onto my desktop to find that nothing had changed. Indeed, every single aspect of my computer was precisely the same as it had been before.
I figured it to be a fluke-surely a corporation as large as Microsoft would have a single living soul capable of understanding why a user would want a request for permission to restart the computer-but then the same event happened twice over a twenty-four hour period.
Surely you boys will be able to clear this up for me. What was so pressing that it could not wait another few hours? What was so important? Perhaps it was a special code to prevent my computer from blowing up? Or from becoming sentient and taking over the world? Perhaps you lot are simply bored and take delight in deleting pages of Word Documents that are unsaved because there’s no intent upon restarting the computer. Is it sort of like purposely blowing up a building because the oven is left on, to prove a point? "Always save your data in case something terrible happens," and if you don't, Microsoft will make sure something terrible does happen? I don’t know.
So as the brainiacs of the computer business, I certainly hope you can tell me. A suggestion, perhaps if you made the software right the first time, you wouldn’t need to update people’s computers on the fly. Just a thought.
Yours Truly,
Jessica K Shaw
I have been a customer for many a year… indeed, for nearly as many years as I’ve been alive. Over these days, weeks, months and so on, I believe I have been pretty understanding. When Windows spontaneously ceased to work, I reinstalled the platform. When core programs mysteriously went missing, I hunted them down. When programs that had previously exhibited no difficulties inexplicably crashed, I took it in stride and good humour and reinstalled them or simply resigned myself to a life without them and put them out of my mind.
Through thick and through thin I have remained loyal. Through every virus, Trojan, and worm I have maintained a degree of understanding. I put up with your less-than-enthusiastic support staff when they were fluent in English, and I put up with being patched through a fuzzy reception to someone in the darkest depths of God-knows-where when you hit upon the miracle of outsourcing. I have dealt with, I believe, quite a lot from your company over the years and I’ve cut you an awfully large slice of slack.
So as you might imagine, I’d like a bit of reciprocation, or at least an idea that doesn’t-how should I put it?-blow.
Whichever cretin developed the idea to spontaneously restart computers, I certainly hope you’ve since moved them to your software development centres so that they may be among men and women of similar intelligence. When I step away from my computer for half-an-hour, it would be much appreciated if I did not return to my computer to find all of my work relegated to the ether-never to be found again.
Allow me to explain. I stepped away from my computer for a phone call, and when I happened to step back I found an impossibly cheerful message informing me that my computer had just updated itself and had to restart-resulting in massive data loss.
“Cor,” I thought to myself, “That must have been an extremely important update to have warranted the unprompted restart of my computer! I wonder what’s changed.”
I logged onto my desktop to find that nothing had changed. Indeed, every single aspect of my computer was precisely the same as it had been before.
I figured it to be a fluke-surely a corporation as large as Microsoft would have a single living soul capable of understanding why a user would want a request for permission to restart the computer-but then the same event happened twice over a twenty-four hour period.
Surely you boys will be able to clear this up for me. What was so pressing that it could not wait another few hours? What was so important? Perhaps it was a special code to prevent my computer from blowing up? Or from becoming sentient and taking over the world? Perhaps you lot are simply bored and take delight in deleting pages of Word Documents that are unsaved because there’s no intent upon restarting the computer. Is it sort of like purposely blowing up a building because the oven is left on, to prove a point? "Always save your data in case something terrible happens," and if you don't, Microsoft will make sure something terrible does happen? I don’t know.
So as the brainiacs of the computer business, I certainly hope you can tell me. A suggestion, perhaps if you made the software right the first time, you wouldn’t need to update people’s computers on the fly. Just a thought.
Yours Truly,
Jessica K Shaw