Microsoft's crab legs payback

Perhaps I enjoyed Maria Semple's skewering of Microsoft corporate culture too much.  I liked her book on facebook, so I should have known there would be technological hell to pay.  Where'd You Go, Bernadette is great fun, a romp narrated by Bee Branch, a tween girl as bright as Paloma Josse in The Elegance of the Hedgehog, but perhaps not as deep. 

Almost as soon as I "liked" the novel for its hilarious TED Talk parody, I got C80003F9 error codes on my failures to retrieve Microsoft Security Essentials and Windows updates. Coincidence, maybe. Aggravating, definitely. No amount of shutting down and reloading my old Windows Vista Home Premium could remove the curse. Now I've purchased and downloaded Windows 7 to replace my unsupported operating system. Are you happy yet, Microsoft?

Obstacles placed on my home computer turf are one thing, but when the Microsoft revenge tracked me to the grocery store things got ugly. The young male cashier did not know the code for those last two ears of corn on the cob of the season, sixty-nine cents each. Since he was searching for "husks" he couldn't find "ears". The other cashiers hollered codes at him.  When he entered the codes, they were rejected.  Same thing happened for the bunch of radishes. How many bunches? 

1     1 is what the teen entered, but that 1 added a $9.74 charge for crab legs to my bill.  Attempts to remove the crab legs added more and more crab legs.  This was going to be the most luxurious false gourmet grocery bill ever! Fifteen minutes, many more crab legs, and a puzzled store manager later, we voided the entire transaction and started over. Went home to make sloppy joes, not crab legs, for supper. Happy yet? At least we now know the product PLU for crab legs is 1.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder