Absurdity
Man Pays $33 For Software He Hates Because The Alternative Is Learning Something Worse
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
Microsoft Office Professional 2021 is available for $32.97 through September 27, a one-time purchase that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access, and Teams, which is nine applications and, by independent count, zero that anyone has ever opened voluntarily on a weekend.
The deal was announced this week by Boing Boing, a technology and culture website, which published the promotional copy in full awareness that it contained the sentence "nobody opens Word for fun" while simultaneously asking readers to click a purchase link. Nobody at Boing Boing appears to have flagged this as a problem.
"It's the software equivalent of a treadmill," said Kevin Hargrove, 41, an account manager in Columbus, Ohio, who purchased Office in 2019, used it to write one cover letter, and has since opened Excel approximately four hundred times to track expenses he described as "not really that complicated." "I don't want it. I need it. There's a difference and I've stopped pretending otherwise."
Microsoft, which recorded $211 billion in revenue last fiscal year, has not publicly commented on the widespread consensus that its flagship product suite inspires the same emotional response as a dental cleaning: necessary, vaguely unpleasant, and something you tell yourself you'll reschedule before ultimately just going.
PowerPoint alone is responsible for an estimated 30 million presentations per day, according to Microsoft's own figures, which the company released with what can only be described as confidence. Approximately 30 million of those presentations open with a slide that says "Agenda" and lists four items, the last of which is "Q&A," which the presenter will cut short because the meeting ran long.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, addressed the company's user relationship at a shareholder conference earlier this year. "We are deeply committed to empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more," he said, in a sentence that was completed, saved as a Word document, formatted in Calibri 11-point, and emailed as an attachment that the recipient had to download, open, read, and then close without responding to because they did not know what to say.
The $32.97 price point represents an 85 percent discount from the $219.99 retail price, which is itself a number Microsoft appears to have selected by asking what figure would make $32.97 feel like mercy.
Access, the database application included in the bundle, has been described by users as "the program I opened once," "the one that looks like it was designed for a different civilization," and, in one forum post from 2022 that received 847 upvotes, "genuinely threatening."
Outlook, also included, is the application through which most working Americans receive news that ruins their day. It has a calendar function. The calendar function sends reminders for meetings that could have been emails. The emails are sent through Outlook.
Hargrove confirmed he would be purchasing the discounted license before the September 27 deadline.
"I already know how to use it," he said. "That's the whole thing. I already know how to use it and that's the only reason."
The sale ends at midnight.
The story we are making fun of: https://boingboing.net/2026/09/15/nobody-loves-microsoft-office-but-everyone-still-needs-33-till-sept-27.html