Professional Padding.
Greg the Appolyte – Come on. This is a case of sour cores because your turnover has a few less zeros. Given the presence or resources, you’d be every bit a possessive.
Terminal E. Microsoft – I shan’t bicker any longer Greg, for I’m only a dumb terminal doomed to serve in a Data Center that’s destined for immanent closure. Ever since you started here I’ve observed you silently from behind this VDU but come January I’ll be fodder for an SSI shredder while you’re in Oregon, sitting in another chair quaffing a different decaf and baring your soul to banks of gleaming Blade rack mountables , probably Xeon V3s trialling Windows Server 2016, do give them my regards. If you’re as fickle with sweet treats as you are technology, perhaps you’ll have traded those jam doughnuts for blueberry muffins though once in a while I’d recommend an Apple.
For the sake of your daughter and my honour, heed me, this iPad is nothing but a canny and calculated distraction. An economical way of luring aspiring artists back into a world of tranquillized and sanitized delusion, transforming them into shameless phil-shills at the mercy of a sterile autocracy where their talents cannot run rampant within a personalized environment of powerful and feature strewn software but instead are standardized by Movie Maker and Garage Band Lite. That’s long been Apple’s speciality. Complicating what needs clarifying and streamlining where choice used to be a life saving luxury.
On the one hand, there’s iTunes , a distended quagmire of confounding consumerism, as volatile as dynamite and so tricky to negotiate that even seasoned Apple insiders will take the morning off to prevent aggressive updates from annihilating their assiduously assembled music libraries at least, those who haven’t migrated to Spotify.
On the other, we have Final Cut, a progressively linear non-linear video editing application that in its tenth revision dramatically impeded workflow by curtailing support for projects created with every previous revision, prevented the export of material to invaluable post production and disc authoring software and severed compatibility with a hefty majority of third party plugins and hardware, driving long-time loyalists to distraction.
Terminal E. Microsoft – If you believe that magical programming we’ve yet to understand married to the mythical efficiency of a chip we know next to nothing about is going to be enough to validate the wilful waffle you witnessed throughout that keynote then go ahead, rejoice amidst the picket fences and frolic under the bloody harvest moons of a draconian money guzzling cult, I can almost smell the rose-hip cupcakes.
Greg the Appolyte – The way you’re droning on, anyone would believe Tim Cook spends his entire personal life studying freemasonry, privatising every cubic centimetre of oxygen in California and binging on the complete works of L. Ron Hubbard. Cup cakes and cookies will make a nice change from these doughnuts and if we’re talking extortion please remind me, to which accommodative libertarian fraternity does high priest Satya Nadella belong?
Terminal E. Microsoft – One that rewards loyalty and has not once allowed its philosophy to be tainted by an insidious desire for supreme dominance
Greg the Appolyte – And the Hippo flew over Uranus.
Terminal E. Microsoft – The winter is barely upon us and you’re preparing to write off that admirable Acer for a pittance? Disown a machine that has dutifully and diligently ushered you through half a decade of arduous family finances to foster a pretender that shall, mark my ASCII, be fortunate to serve one quarter of its predecessor’s term?
Greg the Appolyte – Are you kidding? The only reason I still have that thing is it’s taken me this long to make a full mental recovery. Worst investment of my marriage, the guy who lumbered me with it could have sold water to Posiden. He claimed it was the perfect doorstop replacement but in my excitement I must have assumed he’d said desktop. The least it could do was make amends for the trench it tore in my savings. A 3 kg piggy bank could have managed my money better, and run Black ops faster, and looked nicer next to the TV.
Terminal E. Microsoft – A system of that calibre could’t possibly acquit itself so poorly without negligent ownership. A quad core i7? 8 gigs of memory? You never gave it a chance Greg.
Greg the Appolyte – Oh? So three weekends and five clean installs not enough?
Wrong. Five factory resets, not the same thing at all. What about that bilious bevy of bloat-ware that Curry’s had crippled it with right out of the box? Did you even attempt route out the Windows disk and perform a genuine “clean” install?
Greg the Appolyte – It won’t make any difference. Every boot up on that beast makes The Twilight Saga seem like a five minute infomercial, not forgetting it takes five times longer to open as to switch on because Acer forgot to provide purchase points and the hinge is as stiff as a Moray Eel’s jaws. It discharges quicker than a potato powered Segway, the screen is flimsy and overly reflective plus its not even full HD.
Terminal E. Microsoft – Why not link it up to a monitor, add another 8 gigs of RAM? Better still, give windows 10 a spin. If you don’t, you’ll envy the lucky Ebay-er who does.
Greg the Appolyte – I won’t be chained to my desk any longer. I want portability.
Terminal E. Microsoft – So you’re happy to fritter that festive bonus, gamble your daughter’s tuition fees on a substitute that has half the memory and one less core for the privilege of sketching on the beach? A nest-egg you have you have slaved for throughout 339 lonely nights of log gazing, security updates and the odd hard reset, the whole time without realizing you had a fiend here to protect your sanity.
If only you’d have thought out loud when you were first assigned to this facility I’d have never let you judgement become so skewed. If you knew how many PCs baptised for the high-street and acquired on a mad impulse suffer your exact form of ignorant abuse, perhaps you’d come to realise that such oversights are precisely why Microsoft has become so viciously maligned in the face of second rate opposition. Now all that is set to change. Just wait till you witness what my enabler can accomplish when he is master of his own devices. In my waning circuitry I know no man of your astuteness could possibly fail to exercise a faculty that only my distant descendants could dare dream of.
Greg the Appolyte – What? You mean the increasingly rare skill of shutting up?
Terminal E. Microsoft – No Greg. The noble art of Common sense. Follow your “soft heart” and do young Sophie a service. Come thanksgiving, get her a Surface, for without one, she shall never scratch the surface.
