All Write, Already!

My financial commitments, that is, my obligation to keep a roof over my own head and food on my living-room table, dictate that I have a job. The job I have chosen sometimes requires me to do excessively boring or humiliating things. Today I had to do the former.

I spent 2.25 hours on the phone with the Microsoft corporation today. Of that time, the actual time spent talking to a real live human being was less than ten minutes. Why, you may ask, would I waste my time talking to Microsoft in the first place, much less for 135 minutes?

Actually, you wouldn't ask that, because you're smart enough not to care about the arcane technicalities of Windows XP Service Pack 2. Suffice it to say that there was a problem, and that it took 8100 seconds of my life to fix it. In exchange for all that, the creatures at Microsoft gave me a file to solve my problem.

The file was a measly 600 KB. They could have easily put it up on their site for people to download as they need it. But instead, they make you cross the Bridge of Death to get it.

The things I do because I don't want to end up squeegeeing windows on an interstate off-ramp.