Dear Bill,
I am so excited. I popped popcorn, and broke out the noisemakers. I even found an old stash of bright yellow Spongebob Squarepants party hats. You cannot know the joy you bring to my life. Microsoft Windows Vista (WOW . . . like . . . WOW) is just the latest, greatest thing you’ve done for me. You cannot know the unadulterated ecstacy that the release of Windows brings to my otherwise petty and meaningless life.
Actually, I’ve been planning for this for a while. After the . . . well, shall we call a spade a spade and just say “disappointing” . . . affair with Windows XP, I have to say I had my doubts. But back in 2003, when I heard that the new Windows was just around the corner I ran out to the party store in the mini mall and picked up a bunch of streamers, cake toppers, and balloons. I was so thrilled. Every night, I came home from the record store and sat in my kitchen. I baked a cake most nights, and lit the candles (they spelled out “Longhorn” back then – it took hours to do it), and waited. I waited for your website to tell me that what we now know as “Vista” was out, and I could go out and spend $200 to buy it.
You cannot know the anticipation and the hunger that I felt. I mean, you were right. Every new release of Windows brought earth-shattering technologies to the market and changed the face of the personal computer experience. I really bought all that, and my life has never been the same. I was a little disappointed that after all my effort with the cakes, and the decorations, and the balloons, you kept delaying and delaying the release of Vista. I kept myself satiated with Windows XP SP2 for a little while, but I found myself growing more and more restless for Vista. I couldn’t sleep, and when I did I only dreamed of you, your face so vivid and wise looking down at me from a giant screen, telling me about all the wonders of Vista.
Those guys at Apple were just jerks to you. When I saw that new look you gave to Vista, with its slick glassy interface, all I could think was, “Huh! Those guys at Apple must’ve broke into Redmond like two years ago and stole the blueprints for Vista! Those cheats!” But don’t worry, I know that that whole similarity between the Mac OSX interface and the Vista interface is just reverse industrial espionage from that bastard, Jobs. Every night I burn a little effigy of him on a tiny stone in my bedroom. It smells like incense, because that’s what it’s made from, but I swear I can smell the terror of the competition in those moments. The guys at the record store think I’m nuts.
I had to pay rent and buy food, but I promise I saved enough money to get Vista. I have to be a little honest here. I saw that I can buy the upgrade for $99 at Fry’s, but it said on the display that I can only upgrade a “properly registered” copy of Windows XP or 98. I’m sorry Bill, but I don’t know what that means. I’m glad I just chose to save $10 a month for 20 months so that I could get the whole darn thing. Forget the upgrades – those things won’t help you pay your own bills anyway, Bill. I hear this Windows cost you a ton of money to develop, and with all those delays that couldn’t have helped. I want to do all I can to repay all that hard work.
Hey you’ll never believe this! My Windows XP PC crapped out on me like half a year ago, and I couldn’t afford to get it fixed so I just got an old PC from the library – they were throwing it out – and I put Linux on it. I’m really sorry, I really am. But I don’t make enough at the store to do more than pay rent and buy food, and all those cakes cost me a lot of my savings. I’m sorry. I wanted to reinstall Windows XP on this machine the library threw out, but it’s a few years old. It’s only got, like 250 MB of memory and a few gigabytes of disk space, and this kinda old video card. Linux was the only thing that worked on it. Works like gangbusters, actually! I just leave the thing on at night to heat my bedroom, and it just runs and runs and runs for months without crashing. If Windows XP were still running on my old machine, it would totally be jealous.
But I’m coming back, Bill! I promise! I’ve got my $200, and I’m gonna go to Fry’s tomorrow and buy my copy. But, I hear that Vista is really hard on the computer. It needs like a gigabyte of memory, and tons of disk space. And if I want the cool glassy interface, I’m gonna need a better graphics card. It’s gonna be, like, a year before I can get another throw-away computer that might be able to run it. Or, I guess I could try to get a different job, though I really like the record store. But I swear, I’ll keep Vista on the mantle until I can get that PC, and when I do, it’s gonna be great! I promise!
Gotta go, Bill. I better get some sleep. Hope you have a fun time at the Vista release party. I also hope you don’t mind if I don’t stay up for it – I did all that celebrating two years ago and I’m partied out. You’ll be getting my check real soon.
Your pal,
S
