Saturday, December 23, 2006

A Christmas miracle

Most of the blogs on my RSS feed seem to have dried up slightly over the last few days... and who blames them. But I thought I might lighten your evening (when you creep to the computer to escape the present wrapping, saying that you have to check the weather reports for travel...) and reproduce the following.

As the chimes of midnight rolled over the battlefield, the gunfire fell silent. In the first moments of a frosty Christmas morning, they emerged from their entrenched positions and began to cross the barran no-man's land that was not, on reflection, so wide. The Windows users, weary and fractious from so many needless reboots, held out their hands in cautious friendship to the wary Mac users. The Mac users, bewildered by the unkempt and diverse nature of the enemy, who could not even manage a stylish uniform let alone matching lap top accessories, gradually overcame their fear and engaged the Windows users in conversation, finding after a while that one or two of them actually did know something about web design and new media. After a while, pieces of shareware were brought out and offered to the enemy. A cautious game of Tetris was struck up. Several people began to swap pictures, the Mac users biting their tongues at the delay while the Windows users fretted over their camera drivers. As the sun eventually rose, happy individuals were sat together, blogging and chatting away and remembering how it felt when there were just geeks and non-geeks, back in the day before the wars broke out.

Then, suddenly, a stray blog posting, shot off without thought, suggested that Macs were the lush toys of rich creatives who had never done a real day's work in their lives. Before anyone could add an emoticon, a Mac blogger had returned fire by implying that Windows users were all corporate drones with no souls. In a moment, the battlefield was once more riddled with gunfire and destruction. And the Christmas miracle was forgotten...

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