Author’s note: I’ll be the first to admit that this post is fueled largely by rage and coffee and is entirely and lovingly under-researched. But the first sentence of this post does read, “As a devoted and impassioned Mac user…” and thus, you’d be a fool to expect anything less then rage, over-caffeination, and an inadequacy of research. Having said that, please enjoy.
As a devoted and impassioned Mac user, the first thing that I felt compelled to do with a Microsoft Windows Vista machine (that I begrudgingly accepted an invitation to “test drive”) was simply to make it go away (go away, Vista. You’re too… shiny). Yeah, I just wanted to turn the whole damn thing off. I wanted to go back to my PowerBook and tell her how much I appreciate her and how I’d be a fragile, broken mess without her. But I knew better than to display weakness in front of this unfamiliar beast. And I knew that being faced with the uncluttered comfort of a blank monitor was enough to calm me until I could muster up the strength to go in once more.
Right… so all I wanted to do was to shut the damn thing off. Is that too much to ask? Well apparently it is. Microsoft, holding true to their standard practice of redefining the way things work, has decided to take the universal symbol for on/off and redefine it to mean something else… hibernate or sleep or power-nap or pass-out or whatever they’re calling it now… which is anything but “off.”
Damn it, Microsoft! You can’t do that! You can’t take the tried and true on/off symbol and make it mean something else! That’s infuriating! Think of all the millions of other electronic devices that rely on the universal definition of that symbol. What if Microsoft, in their next iteration of Windows… let’s call it, oh I don’t know, Vomit… Microsoft Windows Vomit, decided to redefine the color red to mean “keep on truckin'” instead of what it is universally known to mean: stop. It would be chaos. Pure traffic chaos. The prolific nature of the Windows operating system is such that millions of its users will be forced to reassociate the color red with “keep on truckin'” instead of “stop.” Millions will die horrible traffic related deaths… all by way of your bloody hands, Microsoft. Can you have that on your conscience? Are you powerful enough to have that weighing down on your soul? Sadly, Microsoft, you probably are. Sigh…
