I believe I hate Microsoft.

Not a unique feeling, I somehow suspect.

Here's why...

I have a new notebook, an early birthday present from my better half (fed up, I suspect, with my frustration with my old Windows 7 machine's inability to my much else than fall over and crash regularly); so, here I am getting to grips with Windows 8, and I find that to read my kindle books on it, I need the new windows 8 version of the Amazon Kindle reader. Not a problem, thinks I, and following the instruction from Amazon, trundle off to the MS 'app store', all innocent-like, to download said thing.

And then, the infernal and almost terminally homicidal rage-inducing logic loops began.

It seemed that I already had a Microsoft account. God knows when this was created, but there it was. So, not knowing the password, I had to try the recovery process. The moment I plugged in my name and post code to recover the password, it locked onto my name and postcode, and asked me a security question. The answer hasn't changed in over seventy years (related to my Mum), and the system - wow, what a surprise, rejected it.

After filling in a form to try to wrest control back, the system told me not five minutes later, by email, there was insufficient information, and locked my more than six years-old dormant account.

So, I tried talking to a human (not on the phone, it's apparently too old fashioned for Microsoft, as it could have solved the problem in about ten seconds flat) on their 'help chat' thingamabob, and got nowhere. It's probably an Artificial Intelligence, it was certainly doing similar logic loops.

Now, bear in mind: I have a birth certificate, a driving licence, I pay my income tax, national insurance, council tax, and various bills every month; I hold a driving licence and Certificate of Professional Competence to drive big vehicles on British roads, and thus my identity is government-sanctioned and approved in big red letters, which were stamped upon my forehead with a nice environmentally-friendly synthetic rubber stamp when I was born nearly forty-nine years ago.

Yet, here I am, with a nice shiny new computer, unable to download even FREE software from Microsoft, because they retain data way past its shelf life, and BLOCK real people, because we cannot give them our electronic inside leg measurement to the nine millionth decimal place.

To say that I'm almost terminally frustrated with this gargantuan bunch of electronic jobsworths is putting it mildly. They are NOT a government, yet they behave like they own the planet. Hell, if you believe the press, they don't even pay their decent slice of taxes. And oh, by the way, what the hell are they doing, retaining data that's over six years old, which has never been accessed in all that time and is clearly expired? Aren't there laws about that sort of thing?

Oh yeah, forgot. They own the sodding planet.

God, I am so bloody angry right now, it's amazing I haven't popped a blood vessel.

If anyone has a way of fixing this huge pile of poo, I'm all ears.

Really.