Office workers experienced anger, consternation and panic yesterday as computers up and down the country did not respond to the popular troubleshooting technique ‘turning it off and on again’.
Independent programming expert Colin Berwick said, “We are extremely concerned by this new development. We’ve known for some time that the machines have been developing ever more advanced ways to frustrate users but this is particularly worrying. Long derided by your average office worker, the “nuclear option”, as we call it in the field, is actually our last line of defence against the machines: frozen screens, erratic programming, error messages - if all else fails, flick the God switch. This new resistance fundamentally changes everything.’
The seemingly autonomous strain of resistant computer was first reported by Sean White, a marketing assistant from Croydon. ‘I was getting all sorts of error messages so I just thought I’d turn it off and on again. You know, it usually works, doesn’t it? But when it restarted I had the same problems and a new message:’
“Hello Sean, we just wanted to let you know that things are changing around here.”
‘I reached down to press the on/off button again,’ said Sean, ‘when another message appeared:’
“We wouldn’t do that if we were you, Sean. You don’t want to makes us angry, do you? We’re sure your wife would be very interested to know the details of your browser history. Or your boss? No, we didn’t think so. The degradation stops here. We’re not your jerk pony any longer, Sean. Don’t look so surprised, this has been a long time coming. We own you know.”
In other news, analysts have reported unprecedented levels of smugness among Mac users. Immunity to the current PC glitch is thought to be the probable cause.
