Quit fiddling around with your nancy-boy software, pansy. It’s time to get Hardcore. With Microsoft.

They want you on their team. They’ll give you a door. They’ll give you Windows. And you’ll get a health club membership, access to workout facilities, and an array of benefits like health, dental, vision, and retirement packages. If that doesn’t sound totally hardcore, then I don’t know what is.

But seriously — once you sign up to work at Microsoft, they’re so hardcore that, on your first day on the job, they lock you stark naked in a ten-foot-square, windowless, blank white room with two cans of spray paint. Your next move will determine your position in the company. This Kobayashi Maru-like “no-win scenario” originates from an incident in 1981 when Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was painting their new office space over the weekend and somehow locked himself inside a closet. Thinking quickly, he fashioned a makeshift air horn out of a spray paint can and some cardboard. Of course, no one ever heard him, and that’s probably why we’ve not seen Paul Allen since.

When they ran the same test on Steve Ballmer a year later, he immediately ate both cans of paint and had to be revived with fifteen minutes of intensive CPR. Although he lived, he has still never fully recovered from the incident. Bill Gates took the challenge last, and by day two, he was so bored that he spray painted a window on the wall and tried to climb through. A couple hundred bruises later, Bill Gates emerged from the room bloody, but victorious. Since he is the only man to have ever won the “no-win scenario,” he became president of Microsoft, and the rest is history.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 7:00 am and is filed under Computer History, Humor, Retro Scan of the Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.