I am being harassed. All I want to do is go about my daily
business – check my emails, write lesson plans, look up some things on the
internet etc. But while I am doing this,
I keep getting messages from the same old man throughout the day. He won’t take no for an answer. I have tried to ignore him but he’s very persistent. He sometimes even takes control of my
computer and forces me to visit his web-site.
I wondered whether this man has been
bothering anyone else. Do you know
him? His name is Bill Gates.
Well, okay, I don’t know whether Bill is
taking an obsessive interest in me personally.
But the marketing tactics of his company, Microsoft, are really getting
on my nerves.
It’s their aggressive pushing of Windows
10. Whenever I turn on my computer, a
message will pop up saying, “Great news!
You can now update to Windows 10.
Here are our great new features...” and so on. If I close the message it just pops up again
20 minutes later. So if I then read the
message and try to find a way to answer it with something like, “No, thank
you”, or “Please don’t send me this message again”, or “If you keep harassing
me, I’m going to call the police”, I can’t find such an option. All I can select is either “Get Windows 10
now”, or “Get Windows 10 later”. I
thought that if you were offering something, you had to entice the other
person, not just keep annoying them until they give in. Imagine trying to attract a member of the
opposite sex at work. Would it be
acceptable to keep asking them out again and again until they got so tired that
they accepted your advances? (In case
anyone is having difficulty answering that one, the correct answer is “No, it
would not be acceptable.)
Bill, if this is your seduction
technique, then don’t be surprised if people look for other options. At the moment I would rather smash my
computer with a rock and move to a stone age village without internet
access than give in and get Windows 10.
I have been known to overreact, however.
“But why wouldn’t you want Windows 10?” you
might ask. “It’s newer and so it must be
better.” Well, maybe. But newer in my experience usually means more
complicated and with more useless features designed to make me spend money.
For example, Windows Media Player was
recently updated and Microsoft sent me a message to congratulate me on my good
fortune. The big change was a shop linking
my media player to the internet so that I could buy songs directly from
Microsoft. I don’t want to buy songs directly
from Microsoft, so I turned the on-line shop feature off. When I did that, the media player stopped
working correctly. It crashes about 50
per cent of the time I try to use it now.
Honestly, it worked fine before.
I’m sure that newer is better for Microsoft. I’m just not sure that it’s better for me.
Next week’s blog will be chiselled
in stone. Come to Nerima English and you
can take a look. Will you be coming
round now, or coming round later?
Vocabulary:
to harass – to subject to aggressive
pressure or intimidation
not to take no for an answer – to refuse to
acknowledge someone’s refusal of an offer
persistent – tending to continue despite
opposition, refusal, difficulty etc.
to get on one’s nerves – to annoy or
irritate
to pop up – especially of messages on a
computer screen, to suddenly appear
to entice – to attract
seduction – the act of persuading someone
to enter a romantic or sexual relationship
stone age – of a civilization or society,
being at a stage where use of stone tools is common
to chisel – to make marks such as letters
in rock, using hard tools
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