| Gates
"Can't even use the clipboard", claims former employee Accusations that Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates is
becoming increasingly remote from the technology which made him his fortune were given a
new lease of life yesterday after a former Microsoft employee stated that the firm's
multi-billionaire owner had difficulty performing even the simplest of tasks using his
company's software.
"Let me tell you", said 42
year old Scanlon Hemmings of Bremerton, WA, "Gates might earn more money than most,
but without guys like me and you helping him out, he'd be a bum!" Hemmings, who was
fired from his $21,000 a year job as an IT Support Technician last week, stated that far
from being the super-nerd of legend, Gates was often completely lost using a PC, with
relatively straightforward tasks such as sending e-mail, printing documents and using a
spellchecker way beyond him.
"I lost count of the number of
times I got sent to help him. The first time I was a bit nervous, what with him being the
boss and all, but when I got there he said he was having trouble with a letter he was
writing. I couldn't work out what that had to do with me, but then I saw it, I couldn't
believe it - he'd used Times New Roman size 8, because that's what the default value was
and he was going crazy with it. He said it 'looked rubbish' and wanted to know how it was
that other people sent him letters with multicolored logos on, with all sorts of fonts and
patterns. I thought it was a joke, but I found later that he was deadly serious."
"Another time, he was struggling
with the mouse, saying that the buttons were set up wrong. He wanted me to look for a
'loose connection' inside the mouse. I said it would be easier just to replace the mouse,
but he was adamant. As I was pretending to repair it, he was muttering something about the
'fucking Apple graphical operating system' and how he should have just 'left the hippy
bastards to it'. When I got his mouse working again - he'd got it set up left handed, you
know - he seemed pleased, but he still said that he 'couldn't see what was wrong with
MS-DOS anyway'."
Hemmings outlined a series of further
misunderstandings, including tantrums thrown by Gates after:
- failing to resize a piece of clipart
depicting a duck about to hit a PC with a hammer
- being unable to forward a collection of
lightbulb jokes to Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer
- accidentally deleting a folder of .dll
files which rendered his entire Office 2000 installation useless.
Hemmings, who lost his job after being
accused of selling unlicensed software over the internet, denied that he was just another
disgruntled ex-employee. "I know how these things can look, a guy gets the boot and
people just think he's got some sort of vendetta going, but believe me, nothing could be
further from the truth. Apart from being fired - that's true, and I've gotta admit, I am
pretty pissed about the whole thing, but really there's no grudge here, I just think that
people deserve to know what's going in there, that's all."
Microsoft refused comment on the
allegations, with a spokesperson admitting, "If we had to issue a statement every
time some crackpot made up some story about our software being cumbersome, bug-ridden and
unusable, we wouldn't have had time to become the top software manufacturer in the
Universe… er, I mean world." The spokesperson then shouted "Look over
there!" before pointing into the sky and running away.
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