JUNE 30, 2026 – One thing I’ve learned in life is to make sure my fly is closed and I’m not wearing ketchup on my tie when reading the riot act to someone. Years ago I witnessed that exact situation on the part of a particularly obnoxious lawyer with whom I was acquainted. Slovenly on a good day, he was not having a good day, which was clear by his aggressive gait and smoke coming out of his ears. I saw him approach a downtown skyway level food vendor who had inadvertently omitted the brownie (as it turned out) from his take-out lunch order. In the first place, there was no reason for the guy to bite the head off the poor cashier. She wasn’t the one who’d left out the brownie, and besides, I’m sure it’d been an honest oversight and easy to remedy. But for crying out loud, I thought, with his white undies so obviously visible through the open barn door of his dark blue suit trousers, his indignation turned him into a comic figure. And in his hurry at the condiment counter, his overindulgence in ketchup for his order of fries was manifest along the longitude of his tie. “Memo to file,” I said to myself. “Before you blow your stack, check your fly and tie.”
But a broader lesson was to be taken from that “memo to file”: before you express untoward criticism, first take a deep breath and make sure you’re not responsible for the circumstances of your annoyance.
That lesson played out today in an Apple store. The precipitating incident was my purchase of a new laptop; or more specifically, my attempt to access my Microsoft Office365 account from the newly acquired device. What should’ve consumed 20 minutes at the outside, wound up taking close to two hours. When I left the store with the brand new clean machine but without access to my essential working apps—Word, Excel, Microsoft Teams and Outlook—thus rendering the laptop largely useless to me, I had every right to be roaring mad at Microsoft. The highly polished Apple employees were quick to tell me that my anger was justified, and their sentiments, genuinely conveyed, worked both as a calming salve and a fan on my anger. The main rep, in fact, said he admired me for not having completely lost my cool—a comment prompted by my remark in jest that “When I finally get to the bottom of this, I’m going to launch a class action suit against Microsoft for Kafkaesque practices in breach of implied warranties of merchantability and demand billions (for the class) in punitive damages for recklessly induced emotional distress.” An “Apple Genius” who happened to hear my outburst allowed that she would “gladly join in.”
As empathetic as they seemed to be, the Apple staff no doubt were glad to see me leave so they’d be free of my pleas for assistance (which pleas, they kindly addressed the best they could). But their politic moral support afforded me a modicum of vindication. If I had every right to be mad, at least I hadn’t completely lost my mind in a quintessentially Kafkaesque nightmare on a merry-go-round, the salient features of which I’ll address in tomorrow’s post.
The two-hour diversion had shot a major hole in my day. I had a full agenda, and the two hours wasted felt like the time you lose in flying through two time zones east from the West Coast to the Midwest, without the benefit of a nap, a meal, a movie, a book, or a single billable minute of work. (Notice, I left out “enjoyable conversation aboard the plane,” since I did have a fine talk with the main Apple rep, who did all he could to work through my problem. Go Apple!) But having reached an age at which maturity of disposition is as important as making sure your socks match, especially when you’re wearing shorts, I kept my cool, even as I entered my sun-baked car, the thermometer of which registered 88F. Nevertheless, I was in a jam: I had a new laptop that was mostly useless unless and until I figured out access to my Microsoft subscription.
As I drove home, I recalled my previous experience with the same problem: new laptop; blocked access to my Microsoft Office365 subscription. My solution back then had been to traipse out to the Microsoft store at the Mall of America—not once but twice, and spending gobs of times with multiple technicians before finally breaking into Fort Knox, as it were. But that store subsequently closed its doors, and no other Microsoft outlet exists in the Twin Cities. I tried to think of possible workarounds, solutions. Then I hatched a brilliant idea—so brilliant, in fact, I felt astonishingly stupid for not having thought of it two hours earlier: call my former colleague, Tim, who was our technology point person when we practiced under the same shingle. (Cont.)
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
