Clippy
#FanFic #MicrosoftWord #Ficlet #PromptResponse #FirstPerson
The phone rang and pulled me out of my well-deserved sleep prematurely. A sound, that couldn't exactly be called a word, escaped my throat as I answered it.
The wailing sound that greeted me might have been a banshee, but it sounded too much like my little sister to fool me. “How do I turn it off!!?!”
“With a hammer,” I said, before I could collect all my senses. It was an inside joke between us, so I was fairly certain that she wouldn't bolt to the garage immediately.
I blinked the sand out of my eyes and rubbed my face awake. “What are you talking about?”
“You were the last one on my computer, and you said you did something to help me, but it's not helping, it's—” My sister's explanation made a dramatic pause only to come back with a barely contained angry growl. “—making me want to kill someone!”
I was stunned for a moment, trying to figure out what I had done with her PC that made it possessed by a demonic entity, coercing my little sister into murdering people.
I had installed a couple of programs. Had I forgotten to tick off all the boxes that installed additional bloatware onto her system? Was one of it crafted in hell to torture every unfortunate soul that didn't pay enough attention when installing WinRAR?
No. That couldn't be it. Windows integrated anti malware program was actually pretty good at catching those.
“What. Are. You. Talking. About?” I tried again. Knowing my sister, I should have asked a more pointed question, but… give me a break. I had just woken up.
“The… Thing. In Word. It appears without me clicking anything, I swear! And it… tells me things I didn't ask for. Make it stop. Please!” My sister was actually pleading now. Poor thing. She never pleaded. Not with me, at least.
I sighed. Ah, yes. I might have — in a misguided, half drunken stupor — activated Clippy on my sister's Word. It really shouldn't come as a surprise that she couldn't handle that little, well-meaning prank between siblings.
“I see. You can remove Clippy—”
“Clippy??! I knew it was your fault. You— you made this thing, to torture me!”
“What, no Clippy is a feature from Micros—” I stopped. Did she just… “Excuse me, but did I just hear you personally hold me responsible for unleashing Microsoft Clippy on the world?”
“I don't care if it was you or Steve Jobs himself! Just make it stop!!” My sister half screamed, half cried into my ear.
Being the reasonable elder sibling I was, I let her get her frustration off her chest before I returned to the phone. “Just hang in there and don't touch your computer. I'll be right over to remove it for you,” I said, reassuringly.
She sniffled and whistled a sweet “thank you,” into my ears before she cut the line.