Another eXPerience I wish I never had

I updated my PC this morning. I put a new power supply (Antec 430W), motherboard (Asus P4P800-E Deluxe) RAM and harddrive into it, effectively giving it a new lease on life. Not that it was bad before, but being limited to 512MB on a modern computer is a bit sad. Anyway, the installation went smoothly and I followed it up with an install of WinXP Pro. I just reinstalled it a month or so back and this time was the magical moment when my activation code finally expired. A little dialog popped up to inform me of this, clippit-styled and gave me a huge number to relay into the phone. Naturally, the voice recognition software they were using couldn’t properly parse my responses as they were strained through clenched teeth. After waiting for an agonizing period on hold to some of the very worst hold music ever I was greeted by an east indian voice asking me to relay the number to him.

I tried to be polite at this point, but failed when my “Activation Number Guru” started peppering me with questions about why I needed this number. Questions like: “…how many computers are you installing this on?” and, “… why are you re-installing this?” I wanted someone I could yell at. I wanted to demand answers for why I shouldn’t pirate this software to avoid having to make these aggravating phone calls. Instead, I had some helpless man half-a-world away in a call center whose job it is to exchange long strings of numbers over the phone. All day. Every day. Probably for 50 cents a day. It’s unbelieveably frustrating and he probably gets yelled at a lot by other irate windows users questioning why they have to be treated like thieves for using a product that is increasingly annoying.

Fuck Microsoft!