We’ve been through a lot together you and I.
I remember when we first met, it was Christmas and I was a child. Such a magical time of the year. You were all dressed up. I wasn’t expecting you and yet there you were under the tree.
Acorn Electron, that was your name back then. You were a bit naughty, I think they’d call it copywrite theft these days but I didn’t care. My Pacman was pretty much the same as the original, travelling around a maze, eating dots and avoiding enemies. Just because he was really an imposter called Snapper didn’t matter to me. And Hopper, dear old hopper, he still had to negotiate a very busy dual carriageway, in just the same way as his cousin Frogger.
We lost touch for a few years and when we met up again, you were all grown up; Word star. You were in the word processing game and you were doing alright. You’d shacked up with a dolly bird; Dot Matrix-Printer I think her name was. You were happy.
Didn’t stay that way for long though did you? Got a bit too big for your boots, took on the pseudonym ‘WordPerfect’, which would have been fine if you were perfect, but we all know you weren’t. You couldn’t keep up with the demand, turned to drink and drugs, started taking .wpd and .wp5. Times were bad.
But you got through those tough times, you ditched the ‘Perfect’ and became just plain old Word, you had a family, the Windows, and you got a good job with Microsoft. Things were looking up.
Then you started to get a bit forgetful. You used to tell me when I’d left my out of office on but not any more. In the middle of a sentence, out of the blue, you just go all Times New Roman on me. Last week you couldn’t even line up your bullet points. In your heyday, your mail merge was awesome. You knew how to charm the ladies with that bad boy, but that’s just a faded memory now.
Yesterday was the final straw, you refused to do anything at all, suddenly without warning you went crazy told me you’d “encountered a problem and needed to close”. I have no idea what I did to make you so cross.
Don’t even get me started on Windows 8. Midlife crisis much? You may as well have bought a sports car and shacked up with iGirl. What were you thinking? It’s ruined our relationship. We used to be so compatible but I can hardly even turn you on any more.
Shutting you up is even harder, I wish you had a button that I could press. I can’t even have a game of solitaire in peace because no one knows where you’ve put the cards.
It was good while it lasted but I’m afraid that this is it. It’s over. I’ve met someone new. You’ve been iDumped.
Josie Jolene 