Microsoft Mojo

To start things off, a quote.

Trip mate: Windows Vista: it’s so easy that you only need a former Microsoft employee who worked on Vista to get it to work.

When I started here last year I went on a trip that is the school's equivalent of MTV's Road Rules: you travel to some place with random strangers and spend a week doing bonding activities that tend to involve adult beverages. A defining feature of this jamboree is anonymity. We weren't supposed to divulge anything about our past lives (job, college, hometown, and the like) until the last day so that we didn't immediately revert to shop talk. It. Was. Fabulous.

And at the end of the trip you find out who you've been trekking mountains and sampling swimming pools with. Our trip included a smorgasbord of careers but here's where we get to the point of this tale. One member was a former Microsoft employee who had the good (mis)fortune of working on Vista. We found out when someone else was complaining about a new feature and he quietly said, "Yeah, that's what I worked on for the last X years...." Awkward! But funny in the end.

Fast forward to this weekend when I dust off the embroidery arm to my sewing machine. There's some antiquated software that is critical to getting the show up and running. You can probably tell where this is going. I failed on numerous attempts to get the thing working again (after having success on an old computer a few years back). So, I call in the trip mate. Trip mate spent almost 2 hours operating on my computer and through some miracle of his Microsoft Mojo, he emerged victorious. Embroidery power has returned to my little sewing hut! This will come in handy now that the wedding dress is at the top of the sewing queue.