At 7:00am on the birthday of my adopted country, I got a call from work. “<software product> isn’t working! Please fix it now!”

I said that I’d dial in and take a look. This wasn’t how I’d planned starting the holiday.

I took a look and found that the problem was that one of a long line of products from <software vendor> was having work done on it and like a house of cards, everything else went to heaven or someplace warmer.

There wasn’t much to be done except to wait for <software product 1> to get back up so that they could restart <software product 2> … <software product n> and then I could work on mine.

<software vendor> isn’t the only one whose products fall apart like this but I wasn’t especially happy with <software vendor> at that moment.

Also at that moment, I glanced down at my mousepad. It was a gift from Corwin. There’d been other times that I’d been unhappy with <software vendor>. Corwin had made a mousepad that had the <software vendor> logo with <naughty word> inserted above it. Seeing that put a smile on my face.

<naughty word> <software vendor> indeed.