Microsoft is Cabbage

Allow me to explain my idiotic title... since I am now a gibbering idiot, turned this way by the corporate stupidity that emanates from Seattle....

My computer died. It's only 6 months old and came with Windows 8 pre-installed (that is a whole 'nother hate filled rant...) The company I bought it from has gone out of business, so no help from that quarter...

I replaced the motherboard and some RAM.

It's now better, stronger, faster than it was before (cheezy humming of theme from The Six Million Dollar Man implied, folks...)

But, it lost its Windows Activation. Yesterday it didn't say anything about that. We went out to celebrate Kev's 50th Birthday blissfully ignorant of the corporate chicanery to follow...

We ate in a new to us place, where I ordered a roasted pumpkin stuffed pita. Well, it was phyllo dough, not pita, and the contents were decidedly un-pumpkiny looking.

Upon querying our waitress, she told us that "Ees garbage!"

Uh, what?

Eventually, someone with less accent explained that she meant Cabbage.

So in our house, cabbage has become a synonym for garbage these days...

Back to my computer woes. Since Windows was preinstalled and all I did was click a button that said "Activate", I never had the &&#@^$&@&*%$ product key code, so couldn't reinstall it...

So we tried Microsoft Support Chat.

I cannot even begin to tell you how incredibly unhelpful they were. But the basic gist is, have a hardware failure, lose your software license. Microsoft sees your frustrating and already expensive problem as an opportunity to pile on and add insult to injury.

We finally found a way around the insanity. We tried activating by phone, and they gave us a replacement activation code (the phone robot was more useful that the chat human!)

So, the evil thing is now reinstalled, and thanks to a nifty freeware product called Belarc Advisor, I have now managed to extract the actual product key number and stash that puppy for the future...

But I am now completely convinced that Microsoft is Cabbage!