[SLUG] My Microsoft Call

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Mon Apr 16 2001 - 17:50:01 EDT


SLUGs:

So I'm at work today and I get this phone call. From Microsoft. At
first, I'm thinking, oh boy, the BSA is coming. No, they want to sell me
something. I wonder how they got my name? (Duh, they're Microsoft; they
probably have _everybody's_ name.)

Okay, so what does he want to sell me? It's some sort of whizbang
website thing that's supposed to bring customers to my site and blah
yada blah. Okay, is it some software I run on my system? No. Okay, is it
something I have to run on the server that houses the website? No. Do I
have to move my site to Microsoft servers? No. Okay, does any of my data
or my customers' data flow through Microsoft servers? Well, yeah.

Aha! He obviously didn't realize who he was calling. So I let him know.
I explained to him how Microsoft had gotten their butts in trouble
recently with their little Passport TOS fiasco. And how Microsoft wasn't
exactly a friend of us folks in the Open Source/Linux world. And how
Allchin and Ballmer had both come out recently against Linux and Open
Source, and...

Click.

I get sales calls all the time from people trying to sell my company one
thing or another, and as aggravated as I am by it, I let them give their
little spiel and then try to politely decline. And they almost never
hang up on me.

But I was ready for this guy. And I danced a little jig when I got off
the phone.

Ha ha hee hee ho ho! (Childish yes, I know, but how often do you get to
just unload on some poor defenseless telemarketing geek?)

Paul



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