Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: “Microsoft is committed to spreading our You’reIn!”

REDMOND, WA - Inspired by the overnight success and impressive first week sales figures of Nintendo’s scatologically named gaming console the Wii (pronounced “wee”), Microsoft has announced that it will create an interactive XBOX 360 module that will allow a player to gyrate and pump his or her hips to move a player or objects on the screen. Microsoft says this new module will put you in the game itself and has decided to follow Nintendo’s innovative name convention by naming their new XBOX addition the “Microsoft You’reIn Game System.”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer exclaimed widly in an interview, “Why settle for just waving your arms around with Nintendo’s unit? With our new system you’ll move your whole body! Already players are telling us that they can’t wait to get a taste of our You’reIn!”

The Nintendo Wii game controller is already being praised by critics because players can move the controllers through the air to play games, not just hit buttons. The You’reIn Gaming System will not only track your movement, but also “learn” from how you interact. Microsoft is calling this ability Artificial Learning (AL) and it is a key component of the You’reIn gaming system. This You’reIn module will be a white vertical box that will sit on the floor in front of your television and is tenatively named the Microsoft You’reIn-AL.

Sony CEO Harold Stringer: “Why Wii when you can play with your Pee Pee Pee!”

“I forsee a day in the next year when a Microsoft You’reIn-AL is in every living room and people will want to stop using their Wiis,” screamed Ballmer in a later phone interview. Critics maintain that Microsoft’s You’reIn is just emulating Nintendo’s Wii. Ballmer replied by talking about the future, “You’reIn is just the first step! It’s our ‘number one’ product! In 2008 we should be ready to start shipping our number two which we call our Player Object Observatory Package (POOP). We think gamers will eat it up!”

Sony’s video game unit has also been paying attention to the Nintendo Wii’s reception. Only two days earlier Sony released its Playstation 3 for double the price of the Nintendo Wii. The Playstation 3 also allows some player movement with its SIXAXIS wireless controllers. And though the Playstation 3 just debuted, Sony is arguably trying to ride the Wii naming trend.

Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata: “You guys are Wiitarded!”

Sony CEO Harold Stringer announced in an interview that by mid-December American audiences should begin seeing advertisements aimed directly at Nintendo. Sony is hoping gamers will begin calling the Playstation 3 the “Pee Three” with it’s commercial tagline being, “Why settle for a Wii when you really want to Pee?”

When told of Microsoft and Sony’s plans Nintendo’s CEO Iwata Satoru said through an interpreter: “What a crock of sh_t…”

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The Nintendo Wii has been released and sold out from just about every store on the planet already but that’s okay with me. I’m not one of these nuts who has days of free time to spend camped out on the sidewalk in front of some electronics store with a bunch of computer nerds and I don’t subscribe to the idea of dropping $1000 on a video game system just to have it “first” when I’ll be able to pick it up for $250 in two month’s time.

And even though I know I won’t be buying a Wii anytime soon, I still decided to look into what the local stores had to offer. Within a few miles of my house is a Wal-Mart and a K-Mart. I didn’t actually go to the stores, mind you, I did what any lazy American does: I checked their websites. First I surfed over to Wal-Mart’s website to see if they would have any information about the Wii and stocking policies and, of course, they didn’t.

The WWII - Economic Revenge, Japanese Style

Then I went to K-Mart’s website and figured out why Nintendo used the name Wii.

For those of you who don’t know K-Mart is a chain of stores which sell most of the same things that Wal-Mart does, except K-Mart purposely brushes their items with a layer of grime before selling them. Imagine walking into a Wal-Mart that is darker, dirtier, less organized, smellier and staffed by more senior and more mentally challenged people that any other Wal-Mart. Now multiply that by tenfold and you have the kind of retail Hell that most Americans call K-Mart. As bad as Wal-Mart is, K-Mart is always much worse. Anyway, both crappy retailers regularly carry cd and dvds and clothes made by Guatamalan toddlers and video games.

At the K-Mart website I typed “wii” into the search engine and instead of some super-cool new Japanese video game system, I got 12 different “WWII” (as in World War II) movies and video game titles! And, yes, K-Mart and its parent company, Sears, do actually carry Nintendo Wii items.

See, Wii appears the same as WII in some lousy search engines which is clearly Japan’s way of reminding the world, “Sure, you bombed us back to the stone age in World World II, but now who’s laughing as we dominate your children’s minds and control your economy with our clever economic revenge!”

This is an outrage! I won’t stand for it! I urge you all to temporarily boycott buying the Nintendo Wii and protest Japan’s clear and obvious revenge tactic on the United States! I suggest that this boycott should last just long enough to allow me to get my hands on one for myself and maybe a few extra units for selling on eBay once the hysteria dies down.

After all, that’s the American way.

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We’re having our biweekly scavenger hunt this morning.

The only thing in our list, as it is every other week, is “something which will hold hot coffee without scalding our hands or leaking all over our desks and dripping into our very sensitive nether regions.”

The Styrofoam Holy Grail of our office

You see, we’re out of Styrofoam coffee cups. Sure, they’re the environmental equivalent of RAID to cockroaches, but you don’t worry about the environment so much when you’re 20 minutes late to cubicle hell on a Monday morning after a weekend of fun. To put it simply: we need those cups to hold our magical elixir of youth and vitality to get us through the day… Yes, I mean coffee.

But without cups we can’t drink coffee. This makes us very, very sad.

This is not the first time we’ve faced this tragedy.

Lisa, our office secretary, forgot to order cups and we obviously forgot to remind her to do her job. Lisa, bless her soul, is a functioning idiot. I’m sure there’s some amazingly tragic and heartwarming story involving multiple car accidents or a blimp explosion or being fired out of cannon or something which explains her total lack of thought, but I don’t really care at the moment.

I know she has a daughter that she’s on the phone with 7.5 hours a day. I know she has a husband she’s on the phone with the other .5 hours. I know she regularly uses Microsoft Excel as her word processor of choice. And I know my bare hands can’t hold fresh coffee long enough to properly stir in the cream and sugar. Don’t even ask what I was planning on stirring the coffee with.

And, dammit, my coworker is screaming in delight. He just found an old soup bowl in the back of the cabinet and is now enjoying a bowl of fresh, steaming hot coffee.

This is not to say that Lisa’s problems only revolve around coffee cups. I’ve been watching her closely and I’ve come to the conclusion that any task involving numbers, colors, letters, words or basic motor skills seems to throw her for a loop. You have to really try to be as dense as she is.

About a month ago I asked Lisa to order a desk lamp for me. About a week later two very large Office Depot boxes with my name on them showed up at my cube. I opened them up to find 40 cases of hot pink Post-It Notes. I had to call Lisa to straighten the mess out.

“Lisa, I now can now label everything we have in the company, including the employees, with little hot pink squares of paper,” I explain.

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.

“I don’t-”

“Then why’d you order them?”

So I marched down to Lisa’s desk and asked her to pull the requisition form. This proved to be a special type of challenge because Lisa’s filing system is apparently based on some set of criteria which only people in padded rooms can decipher.

Finally she found the form and presented it to me. She had somehow taken the first two digits of the desklamp sku number and put it in the “Quantity” field, resulting in a heck of lot of items that were two digits less than a desklamp. At least it wasn’t 40 desks.

Cripes! Another coworker just dumped out his pencil holder and is using that for coffee. He’s now enjoying a hot cup up joe that’s only slightly marred by that “bottom of the cup pen-ink and pencil-shaving” flavor. Lucky bastard.

These ordering problems with Lisa are not isolated incidents. Just lask week I asked her to order a few office supplies from Office Depot. On Friday I ended up with a blank box that had no label containing a book entitled The Wisdom of Menopause. The really spooky thing is that Office Depot doesn’t even carry that book.

When I asked Lisa about it she simply explained that she had obviously given me the wrong package. Obviously. Though I had to wonder what the person who ordered this book was wondering when she opened her box and found a heavy-duty Swingline stapler, a box of dry-erase markers, a case of paper towels and a bottle of Wite-Out.

So the search for coffee cups continues. Sure, the employee cafeteria has something we could use, but they charge us a dime for each empty cup, so it’s really a matter of pride to not have to resort to that.

The way I figure it we might as well just order a dozen ceramic coffee cups and not have to worry about constantly restocking our supplies. I’ll fill out the paperwork for the mugs and give it to Lisa today, which leaves only one question…

What on earth are we going to do with the 120,000 Brother SX-4000 Electronic Typewriters we’ll receive instead?

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