Fuck Windows 10.

Management decided it was time for an update, so now whenever I boot up my desktop, I’m confronted with a new picture of some exotic locale I’ll never see in person. Brazilian jungles. Italian villas. Bahamian beaches. Windows 8 had its problems, but at least it didn’t actively taunt me.

What gets me are the fucking captions. “The peaks and valleys offer spectacular hiking, but…” “We can’t say how many steps it takes to get up here…” “If you’re planning on visiting this peninsula’s famously picturesque castle on foot…” Glimpses at a reality outside my cubicle hidden by three tiny dots.

And always that same question lurking in the top right of my screen: “Like what you see?” Yeah, I do, thanks. I want to be there, wherever “there” happens to be today. Shit like this makes me miss the fast food jobs I worked through high school and college. The managers like NVA lieutenants, scrawny but with that arrogant “fuck with me, I dare you” look in their eyes. The franchise owners and their mirthless chimp grins. The high-out-of-their-mind servers who would sidle up beside me at the grill and tell me I have intrinsic value. I’d go home with knife calluses and collapsed arches, but at least it was honest work. Now I put numbers in a spreadsheet.

The best I can hope for on my salary is a Floridian retirement. Spend the remainder of my days knocking back wine coolers on the beach, listening to Jimmy Buffett with the wife until we both dry up and blow away. But if that’s coming, it’s a long ways off. Chances are I’m going to spend the next fifty years sitting beneath these fluorescent lights doing what somebody else tells me to do. By the time I’ve saved enough to buy a condo within driving distance of the beach, that red tide shit will have killed all the turtles and the fish and I won’t even want to go.