Z: letter of complaint

Address
Date

Dear Lord,

This head that I have is of the wrong specification. It is unable to
communicate effectively with the other devices in my worldwide
networking environment. The problem has been ongoing over a long period
of use, but given my technical illiteracy, I only identified the source
the other week when a window flashed up a warning that my sleeping
tablets may cause drowsiness.

I pieced together a history of similar device communication problems
that suggest to me that my central processing unit is incompatible with
the more sluggish devices to which I am linked. Furthermore, it seems
that the inputs I have received from external modules have been coming
through as utter gibberish from the moment that I plugged in and
switched on and I feel that the fault lies with you.

I have listed just a tiny fraction of the e-idiocy I have had to put up
with as specific examples. Shortly after I was issued with the faulty
hardware, I retrieved from a parent directory the instruction to quit a
macro that I was executing on the grounds that it was not big and that
it was not clever. When I attempted to override the instruction by
telling the system that whilst the macro was indeed not big and not
clever, we should instead concentrate on its positive attributes, the
system crashed and would not restart until the following morning. In
contrast, I am now receiving regular help files stating that such glib
quick fixes are the only correct and viable approach to all problem
solving.

The gremlins in the machine predate the above. Some four years before,
I downloaded a text from the ethernet. The document was a poem, which
was translated from sheep language to English without prompting either
by my processor or the host server. Not only was the translation
incomplete -the first two words were "Baa Baa"- but also, I believe
that the syntax was corrupted. Ever since, I have been unable to
download the correct version without the same thing happening but logic
dictates that it should read something like:
'"Baa Baa (sic) Black sheep have you any wool?"
"Yes Human, Yes Human, I'm a sheep, aren't I? However, I regret to
inform you that I have a number of orders to fulfil and there may be a
long lead time."'

I have experienced some connection problems, which (I believe) stem
from the basic fault. Occasionally I will log out from what is
virtually my reality for the duration of an evening only to log back on
the next morning to a series of remote server messages informing me
that I have made some serious syntactical errors and fatal input/output
miscalculations the previous night. When I scan my hard drive for
evidence of malfunction I receive back the standard system message "You
were charming, witty and gregarious throughout. No misbehaviour has
been detected in memory. Rescan? Yes or No."

More recently I have experienced problems with my drivers. I find that
drivers installed on other machines are slow and they tend to stay in
the outside lane of the superhighway on a dial-up connection whilst my
connection is through high-speed broadband. My attempt at a solution to
the problem was to massively increase my ram. When this failed to
remove the obstructions, I tried even more ram but unfortunately my
system was arrested and, after a serious miscarriage of query errors, I
had to use windows in order to get back online. It transpires that in
doing so, I had performed an illegal operation and that led to severe
instability.

I am now returning this unit to the sanctuary of your company and I ask
that you either redeem or refund me within thirty days. Should you fail
to do so, you will see me in court.

Yours et cetera et cetera,

I. Mac.