I’m sure many other people have been down this road before, but I can’t hold my peace any longer. Microsoft Word is driving me absolutely crazy. It’s almost impossible to use for anything fancier than a goddamned grocery list.

Nested lists are a complete nightmare; one wrong move, and not only is your current list completely screwed over, but any subsequent lists are in grave danger of carrying the same oddities. It’s like a metastasizing cancer. God help you, too, if you need a list format that doesn’t conform to the standard A, B, C, or 1, 2, 3 defaults. It took me a solid week of struggle before I finally beat Word to my will.

I’m convinced that somewhere, buried deep within Word, there’s a preference setting called Cause Random Woe, which is of course turned on by default. I just haven’t found the damned thing yet. Even with Word being set to display all the hidden formatting characters it uses behind the scenes, there’s always something they’re not showing you; why else, for instance, would removing a page break have misapplied a paragraph style to all the following text in the document, turning my nice manual INTO SCREAMING CAPS? The mind boggles.

The standard explanation is that Microsoft is evil, but I’m not sure I buy it. I mean, they’ve spent a lot of money and time on Word; usually, that much effort is better spent on more effective methods of delivering evil to a large cross-section of people, like genocide, terror bombings, and McDonalds value meals. To me, the ripe whiff of incompetence is in the air. Have you ever worked with someone who, while not actually retarded, is deeply stupid and vomits on your desk at random intervals? That’s what working with Word is like.

I’m confident that after having to grapple with Word, which is a $500 dollar product, to get it to perform basic layout functions, I would think more highly of Bill Gates even if he were to masturbate into a sack of drowning kittens, wipe his ass with the flag, and sodomize a morgue full of dead nuns for his finale, as long as he got his numberless minions to get Word to play nice for once.