So, begin our story clear back at the beginning of 2010, when I am tasked with finding Project Management software for Peyton Place to implement. Of course, at the top of the list is Microsoft Project.

I manage to locate and implement a 100% free open source PM application that runs beautifully on our web server. I let everyone know it's there and how to log in. This is mid-year by this point.

Months go by, and nobody uses the software. I beg. I cajole. I plead. I threaten bodily injury. The software goes unused.

Finally, just a few weeks ago, I uninstall it.

Anybody want to guess what happens next?

Fucking PHB sends out an e-mail - to everyone except me - giving them a link to this nifty new project management software he's found, and telling people to evaluate it.

It's not free. And it involves hosting corporate data on servers I have absolutely no control over.

Now it's time to play the "How to Piss Off Your Network Admin In One Easy Step" game.

"the airplane can sense its position and guide itself through loops"

http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/science-scope/making-airplanes-fly-like-honey-bees/5540/

So, just to take your mind off the TSA pat down you just got... sheesh. I can see it now...

Me, sensing trouble in the wind: "Yeah. What do you need?"

Him: "Well, it would be really great for my work if I had the ability to scroll left and right the way I do up and down..."

Yes, you guessed it. He wants a new mouse. Is it wrong of me not to have looked very hard before I told him we don't have any?

A woman went into an AnusMark store to make a payment on her ConHugeCo cell phone bill, and the AnusMark employee applied the money to a nonexistant ConHugeCo landline account. We're not sure how the person did this since the cell accounts and landline accounts have entirely different account numbering schemes. But that's part one. Part two is that the AnusMark store assistant manager said he'd fix things by saying nevermind to the mistaken payment and making another payment drawn out of store funds.... to the nonexistant landline account, oopsie.

Some errors are really hard to make, but they managed to make it twice. I'm told that the assistant manager's supervisor came on the line and blamed... the ConHugeCo cell phone people who have been standing back going "huh? wtf?" for everything that has gone wrong. Different breed of stupid on that.

I have the beginnings of unilateral bursitis ("mouse shoulder"), so I can't use a standard mouse for very long. Instead, I have trackballs, one at home, one at work, and very nice they are -- been using them for fifteen years or so. Kensington figured out how to make solid hardware...

Problem is, they stopped driver development years and years ago, and the drivers have recently started showing a fault: many installers, querying the mouse, send a NULL as part of the request, and the program fails with an access violation in KMW_DLL.DLL.

As long as it was only the Thunderbird and Firefox updaters doing it, I was OK with it; they didn't update terribly frequently, and always with warnings, so I could uninstall the mouse driver, stick a generic mouse onto the machine, and do the install that way... but my new phone's installer also chokes. As do several other things that I want to use. I suspect that the problem is actually deep inside Microsoft's MSI handler, and it shows in everything's installer because they're all using that handler. Microsoft being as unhelpful as they are, my only choice is to dump this perfectly functional hardware...

so...

...I want a...

That particular week, a week I am happy to say was quite some time ago, RetailComputerStore offered a laptop for sale. The price was, if I remember correctly, $599. The sale price was $599, but in addition, we threw in a $100 gift card. Some lady came in, bought the laptop, and as was sometimes the case, the computer didn't distribute the promotion correctly.

"All right, give me a minute here. I'm trying to correct something... the computer is ringing up your computer, but it's not registering your free gift card."

"Well, I want that!"

"Right, right. Yeah, I'm not sure why it's doing this, but I'll work it out."

It takes me another 10 minutes of re-keying the promotion. I eventually decide that someone at corporate screwed up, which was often the case, and decided it was no longer worth my time to try and fix.

"Ma'am, I'm sorry about that. Thanks for waiting. I can't get this promotion to go through, so I tell you what I'm going to do... I'll just take what would have been the value of that card right off the price of the computer. You can call it an 'instant discount'."

"Oh, well, thank you!"

"Okay, so your total is going to be $499."

"Right. Where's my free gift card?"

"Ma'am... we're not going to need to give you a gift card. Instead of giving you the card, we're taking the money right off the top."

"Right!"

"So... that'll be $499, plus tax."

"But it says here I get a gift card!"

"...Yes, but we're having trouble with that promotion, so I'm giving you something better. Instead of charging you all that money, and giving you a gift card, I'm lowering the price of your computer, and you can keep your money. You don't have to come back and buy more stuff. You can spend that money however you want."

"But you're supposed to give me a gift card!"

"Look... if you want, I can put a $100 gift card on the tab. I have no problem doing that. You'd still be paying the $599 in the ad."

"But it's supposed to be FREE!"

"It is! The computer is $599 either way. You can either take the computer as it is, with no gift card, for $599, or you can take the computer and a $100 gift card, for $599. It's $599 either way. It's just that, since I've been having this trouble, I'm giving you a third option... just take the $100 off the top. Most customers would rather that anyway, since it's less money out of their pocket in the first place."

"So, it's $499?"

"Yes."

"But the gift card is supposed to be free..."