Posted by Computer Rants
I have had a love-hate relationship with computers and with Microsoft for years. I often plead with my computer to just do what it is supposed to do rather than screwing up, giving me endless error messages and in general Fucking with my head.
So, about a year ago, I started writing these poetic rants down and sending them to Microsoft. They have not yet responded.
Here then are my Microsoft rants for your pleasure.
Dear Microsoft – Why I Left You
Dear Microsoft
I have left you for good. I wanted to let you know why in vain hopes that you will finally take the time to fix the many problems plaguing your software. But since you never respond to my emails and your on line forums are not that helpful I doubt it will make a difference.
I left because your products are so full of bugs and errors that I has become increasingly hard to tolerate. They have always been problematic but for some reason it has gotten worst.
I left because Excel was becoming so unreliable that I could not stand using it any more.
I shifted to Google docs and have had no problems at all. The docs work every time and has some features that are better than Excel including for example the ability to add or delete multiple rows or columns rather than having to do it one row or column at a time.
Excel has consistently given me three different annoying errors. First, every fifth or sixth entry I encounter an error saying that there is a circular reference. When I clicked help it suggested that I inspect the cells to find the error and remove it but when I tried to search for it I could not locate the error and realized that I would have to manually inspect each cell, a prospect that would take hours to accomplished and I don’t have hours to spare. I tried copying everything into a fresh new document that did not work. The error still occurred. I opened a brand new document and with in seconds the error popped up despite the fact that I had not entered more than two cells and there was no circular references anywhere.
Well, this has been a chronic but annoying error. But it was not the reason I left.
The reason I left is that about two months ago, when I tried to import some data into Excel I encountered an error message saying that no more fonts could be applied. Then I had to press okay and the error would repeat, until it would go away after ten or twenty times of pressing okay. Once I pressed okay 400 times before giving up.
I frequently had to reboot my entire computer to solve the problem.
And of course that meant that my work would be lost because the auto save button is always grayed out and has never worked once.
Another problem is that Excel would frequently go into Not respond mode. Sometimes I would have to close the spreadsheet and re-open it.
Whenever I open excel for the first time, I will often get five to ten versions at once and I will then have to manually remove each open file.
I have also had problems with Word. Word also opens multiple versions whenever I open it for the first time. Some times, it takes twenty minutes to open and clear out the multiple versions.
Microsoft word also randomly not responds just like Excel.
And Word also sometimes fails to save documents. The auto save button has never worked.
One week I kept track of all the errors I was having and calculated that Microsoft Word had a 60% error rate and Excel a 50% error rate meaning that 60 percent of the time when I opened Word I encountered an error minor or major.
Finally, Microsoft dictation does not work. Usually I have to click windows H shortcut five to ten times to get a stable connection. And then when I do the dictation program provides gibberish for every other word. If I am lucky I may get a sentence or two in clear text.
It is hardly worth using and I have given up on it. But on the other hand it has led to many delicious found poems which I have shared with her and posted on my blog.
So, for these reasons, I am finally giving up on you.
I would love to receive a response but won’t hold my breath.
Thanks
Jake Aller
Microsoft How I Hate You
published in Lotus Eaters Magazine
lotus eater magazine
For thirty years I have had the Microsoft blues
For thirty years I have had a love hate relationship
With my damn computer
I love it when it works as it advertised
I love it when the internet is fast and furious
I love it when my emails work
My Itunes work and my word works
But all too often
All I get is grief
It starts with the error messages
Written in a strange haiku like language
That only computer geeks understand
Things like
General Failure reading disk drive
Begs the question who is this General Failure
And why is he reading my disk drive anyway?
Or my favorite
“Not responding” as the computer freezes up
For no apparent reason
Other than to fuck with my head
Sometimes my computer can’t find a printer
A printer that is connected to the computer
And one that they found five minutes ago
And the dreaded blue screen of death
That appears randomly
Dumping memory somewhere
And killing my computer slowly
As I watch in real time
Powerless to stop
How it eats all my work
That I have failed to back up
One day I counted how many times
I ran into computer errors
70 percent of the time when I open Microsoft
Something goes wrong
Sometimes I want to shoot my computer
Put it out of its misery
As I curse up a blue storm
The computer looks at me
With an evil grin
It continues to fuck with my head
Nothing but silence from it
And all the other computers in the world
They smile knowing that they have tortured me
Yet again
Mission accomplished.
Computer Blues (revised)
Sometimes I think
My computer is plotting against me
And only me
Trying deliberately to drive me mad
My computer knows when I am busy
Then it throws a hissy fit
Refuses to boot up
Crashes constantly
Looses data that it had the day before
Or five minutes before
Or refuses to save the data
Just fucks with me
As it loves toying with me
Making me yell and scream
At my damn computer screen
Cursing up a blue stream of blue curses
As the blue screen of death
Marches across the dark blue screen
Smiling at me
As I beg it
To do what
it is supposed to do
Just once I beg it
Do what you are supposed to
Open the document once
Not twenty times
Do not not respond
In endless loops of opening
Not responding refusing to close
Until I respond to the error code
Please Mr. Computer
Quit playing games
Play my music
Don’t wipe out the sound
On the fifth attempt to play music
Don’t take an half hour to load Microsoft products
Don’t freeze up on opening ITUNES or Groove or Spotify
Don’t give me computer haiku error messages
That only make sense to computer geeks
Such as general error reading files
Who the ***** is this damn general
And why is NSA reading my files
Or can’t save the file
Or can’t save the an open file
When it just did ten times in a role
And in Microsoft excel
Refusing to move the cursor
Just freezing in place for a moment
And all the other gobblygook messages
That pop up every five minutes it seems
As the computer slowly drives me mad
Flashing the final insult
User driven mad
Mission accomplished
More Computer Blues
Sometimes I think
My computer is plotting against me
Trying deliberately to drive me mad
My computer knows when I am busy
Then it throws a hissy fit
Refuses to boot up
Crashes constantly
Looses data that it had the day before
Just fucks with me
As it loves toying with me
Making me yell and scream
At my damn TV
Smiling at me
As I beg it
To do what
it is supposed to do
Plead to the Computer Gods
Today I woke up
As I usually do
To yet another mystifying morning
Of unspecified computer errors
Could not get the computer to work
Then when I finally got it to work
After an half an hour
Microsoft word did not load
And when it did
I finally located my work
From yesterday
I had to find it in the roaming file
Why?
Who knows?
Only to find
That most of what I wrote
Had vanished into the ether
No explanation no warning
It was there saved yesterday
And now gone for ever
Once I did an experiment
Tracking computer errors for a week
75% of the time I encountered errors
Most of the time simple
Screen freezes no response message
Then when I recovered the program
The data was gone
Microsoft has yet to respond
to my e-mail
I suppose I need to do it again
But today I will close with a prayer
To the Computer Gods
Just once I would like
You to do what you are supposed to do
Open my documents
Save my work
And not give me any errors
Crashes or other unspecified problems
Is that too much to ask
Oh, Computer Gods
Just once
Do what you are supposed to do
That is all I ask of you
Prayer for Computer (send to Microsoft)
Every morning
I start my day
Cursing my damn computer
Been doing this for 30 some years
Since I bought my first computer
The Atari back in the 80’s
There is always something
Once I spilled coffee
On my first computer
The screen fizzled
Then green 666 appears
Endless repetition
Of the evil number from revelations
Freaked me out
It was 1984 after all
Was my computer making a political point?
Then of course
Endless blue screens of death
Fatal error reading disk drive
And my favorite computer error haiku
General Failure Reading Disk Drive
Begging the unanswerable question
Who is this General Failure
And why is he reading my disk drive
Years ago a computer techie
Told me the secret
that they don’t want you to know
99% of computer problems
Can be solved by rebooting
And 99% of the time
No one knows what went wrong
Or how to fix it
And so it goes and goes
Endless computer meltdowns
Mostly harmless
A couple of malware incidents
Once my computer was possessed
By evil malware that kept opening
And once I had an early version
Of ransom wear
My computer warned me
A dangerous virus had infected
My computer
Pay us money to fix it now
Had to take my computer to the shop
Reformate the hard drive
To remove that computer bug
But once my computer just died
Loosing half my recent data
Just because it wanted to
No reason given
So today instead of cursing up a blue storm
Of my own personal blue screen of death
I offer this short prayer to the computer gods
Today just for today
When I turn you on
I want you to do what you are supposed to do
Everything works
Everything is fast
And no more damn computer error haiku
Just do your fucking job
Dear Microsoft
Latest Found Poem
Hope you are amused by these and you have my permission to publish them
But more importantly I hope you can see that your dictation program needs a lot of work. It is still about 50 percent accurate with sometimes hilarious unintended consequences.
Also I usually have to click it on and off up to ten times before I get a stable enough connection to get it to work.
Hope you can fix it! Would be nice if it worked.
Here’s the poem
Today’s plan
go for John
Cup in my car
Coca
Woke up
Feeling Tom Carl Karma
Hanging out with Amber
Comment:
Who the fuck is Amber anyway?
And why does she keep popping up
Is Microsoft trying to tell me something?
End comment
Dictation is so chu danger
have some more cell phones
till acting weird
But It is good
working To get to work
today’s plan
go for John coach canpell
go to temple
Anthony Con Nam
for Angela too
Register the properties for sale
Mike
Look at Panels today
but that will probably
have to be next week sometime
Maybe Monday Or Tuesday
Port Wednesday
Want to go tonight
he’s only children
next week
so would want
to mail down the dates
this morning like we discussed
The rest of Microsoft plans
Will write this up
And send it to Microsoft
Essential found
and I’m standing in
More feed back from today’s dictation trials.
I was trying to write down some recent music I downloaded. Here are the results for two of the entries in my daily journal. I offer these as further examples that your dictation product is not working.
Rachmaninov Symphonic dances was transcribed as
“F*** man enough so funny dances” Only thing accurate was the word “dances” Rachmaninov does contain the word Man so that is partly right
Symphonic could sound like funny I suppose
Rachmaninov contains 11 letters, F****man enough contains 15 letters. Three letters were correctly transcribed but not in the right order.
Symphonic was transcribed as So Funny Symphonic contains 8 letters, so funny contains 8 letters, only three letters in common S,Y and N
Statistical analysis
24 words in dictation three words one given name
24 words in transcription seven words only one word was correctly transcribed
6 letters were correctly transcribed.
Or a 25 percent success rate or 75% failure rate
Second Example:
Beethoven Cello Sonatas (22 letters three words)
Painter mang Cho sonatas (22 letters four words)
The words Beethoven and Painter have one common letter
The word cello and mang Cho have one common letter
Sonatas was accurately transcribed
Statistical analysis five letters out of 22 were accurately transcribed, or in other words 17 were mistakenly transcribed. Or a 29 percent accuracy rate.
So far the accuracy rate has been hovering between 30 to 70 percent. It is a word for word issue. Sometimes not often the entire paragraph is correct, more often than not, half if correct half is gibberish. I have had fun writing found poems out of the verbatim transcripts, some of which I shared earlier, and above.
Microsoft Problems Redux
Tried to get the new dictation program to work and gave up, scheduled a service call Sunday with detailed feedback. Also send Microsoft my Microsoft sucks document.
Felt good to get it off my chest. The problem with Microsoft is the same problem most big companies have, they have lousy customer service and they put out shoddy products and don’t really worry about competition until they get their asses whopped by someone who pays attention to the customers and put out a superior product at a better price and really cares that their products work as advertised every single time. With Microsoft they are so focused on the latest thing they don’t go back and fix the bugs in their everyday products. And they ignore customer complaints.
What a contrast with word press and with doutrope. Both have superior customer service and I love the products because they fix my issue quickly, professionally and with kindness.
The one time Microsoft commented it was a snarky comment, “ dude focus on one problem at a time and we don’t time to dig into your complaints.”
Finally got the dictation program to work.
The dictation still does not work
sizzling hot coffee destroys my computer
sizzling hot coffee
fizzing away
killing my computer
fizz, snap, pop
as the coffee splashes
on the computer
666 says the computer
sizzle this says
the cup of coffee
Fake Software
Fake software
Is everywhere these days
In Asia and elsewhere
Half the software in use
are illegal copies
the real deal is expensive
and difficult to use
the copies are cheap
and mostly work
although viruses lurk
in every copy
and my Microsoft company
checks up on me
whenever I use my software
off line I get a message
telling me they can’t verify
that it is me
so, log on immediately
or else they imply
Thanks Microsoft
ITUNES
Seems to always not find
My music I downloaded from a CD
Thanks
ITUNES for your concern
And so, it goes
The constant battle
Against the fake software
But the fake software battle
Can’t be won
For in this age of fake things
Everything ultimately becomes
Just another fake thing
In a world of fake things
Greatest Computer Software in the World
Another company
At the dawn of the computer era
Discovered the same secret
In the modern fake world
It does not matter
That your product
Is over priced and does not work
Is buggy and filled with errors
Just hire the right marketing geniuses
And soon the world
Will become convinced
That they have to have your product
True computer geeks
Loudly complain
That it is the worst software
In the world
And I have proof
One day I counted the number of times
I encountered errors using their software
60 percent of the time
I encountered some error
Some minor just hanging up
For no reason
Others major errors
Requiring me to reboot
Several times
Before I got a stable connection
Then it would work for a while
Until it did not any more
I sent my results to the company
But they never respond
Truly the worst software
In the world
But who cares about that
Marketing is king
In this world of fake things
