Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Goodbye, old friend

Today at work, where I have a PC, I lost a friend.  I was upgraded to Office 2007.  I launched Outlook, and my dog was gone.

I am probably one of the few people who liked the office assistant.  Most people take one look at the leering paperclip and want to kill it.  I turned it into a dog and have had it as my desktop companion for eight years.

I'm used to seeing the dog put its feet on my desk while I'm typing; using a flame thrower on paper when I delete something; and tossing a sheet of paper when I print.  It would bark at me if I made an error or if it needed my attention.  It has often stood annoyingly in front of exactly the button or menu I needed.  It was always happy, patient, and fun.
When I would open an Office application, the dog would come through an arch, and when I would exit it would create that arch and exit through it.  It's made its final exit, and I didn't get to say goodbye.

Going online to find a picture of my dog, I discovered it had a name, Rocky.  I found a few pictures, but I'm still looking for one with the flame thrower and one with the arch.  If you happen to find those pictures, please send them my way.

My hope (am I in the denial phase?) is that someone will resurrect the dog in a non-servile app that will allow it to run free on our desktops.  Please resurrect him into Mac land!

3 comments:

Tommy said...

The word is that they dumped all the assistants from future releases... sorry!

Fun article!

levinzky said...

There is no doubt, I just couldn't stand that smug little paperclip. I didn't realize you could change him to a flame throwing dog though!? ......"Thelma" would have been proud.

good read.

Kathleen said...

I never knew that was possible! that is so cool, and I'm so bummed you lost your friend!