The root of all evil.

The hotel bar downstairs was crowded (infested, really) with a whole bunch of obnoxious guys wearing suits, and those cyborg-ish bluetooth headsets. I knew right away that they were from the sales division of Microsoft. They were way too annoying to be IT guys or programmers. And they had that evil aura about them that is so characteristic of software sales executives.

So, after they confirmed my suspicions (with many business cards and various demonic chants), I proposed a drinking game: I would name an upcoming Microsoft feature (for Vista or IE) and if I was correct, they would drink, and if I was wrong, I would drink. This really wasn't fair, since I just recently attended one of those roadmap meetings, but they didn't need to know that. I ran down the list (flip 3D, crappy tab browsing, broken AdSense, etc), and in no time, the whole crowd was drunk. I thought of throwing them a few freebies (like real malware protection and IE security) just because I was getting thirsty, but finally decided against it, so as not to compromise the integrity of the game.

I closed out with one of my favorite quotes from alt.sysadmin.recovery: "Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product."

They didn't get it, but I thought that it was very dramatic.