Friday, August 03, 2007

Full Disclosure, Please!

At some random moment, a dialog box appears on your computer:
An update is available for Windows MultiMixer Codec Homogenizer for Microsoft Office Depot 2.4. Would you like to install it now? YES NO CANCEL

Now, what I'd like to see would be full disclosure, which would involve a slightly longer message in the dialog box:
An update is available for Windows MultiMixer Codec Homogenizer for Microsoft Office Depot 2.4. This update addresses issues that you will never ever encounter, unless you're running a single-pole mutated asynchronous wireless network in a rarified environment--like say, the moon--while failing to address real issues that we've known about for years: issues that have driven you crazy since the first day you bought this computer--like giving you the "blue screen of death" whenever you're in a huge hurry to get one little tidbit of info off the computer before you rush out the door for an important meeting that you have just enough time to get to. If you choose to install this update, you will immediately surrender control of your computer to the update program for the rest of the day. While it is theoretically possible to keep working on other tasks while the computer updates, let's be real for a moment. Your computer will run slower than cast-iron pantyhose, meaning that you would be more productive to leave your office, drive to Kinko's, do your work there, then take the rest of the day off. If you choose to watch the installation process, a series of green blocks will crawl across your screen, leading you to believe that when they reach the other side, the update will be complete, when in fact that's only phase 1 out of 28, and that took an hour and seventeen minutes, only we're not telling you how many phases there are up front because if we did, you'd hire a hit man to bump off Bill Gates and then come take you out of your misery. At the end of the process, you will be asked to reboot your computer, not once or twice, but once for every year that you didn't donate $2 to the presidential campaign fund on your IRS Form 1040 (don't ask us how we know how many that is; believe us, you wouldn't like the answer). On your next-to-last reboot, you'll get another dialog that tells you that the update failed to install properly and that you should try starting the process again, at which point, your computer will freeze, refusing to respond even to the Ctrl-Alt-Delete command. You will have to unplug the computer and then restart it, causing it to display a nasty message about shutting down Windows properly, and because you didn't, it's going to destroy random pieces of your data, and even at that, for eight weeks, your work will be interrupted every two minutes by a pop-up that asks if you'd like to reboot your computer now. So...you've got to ask yourself a question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk? YES NO CANCEL

3 comments:

Jim MacKenzie said...

Frost, you need to lay off the energy drinks for a while....

Anonymous said...

Get a mac, problem solved.

Anonymous said...

you and your laptop not getting along?