I invented Spyware

Ok, so I didn't invent Spyware. Is this the first time you've read something on the internet that isn't true??

But it is funny how sometimes you say things that later on turn out to be a little scary. Some years back I worked for a while designing chips to go into flight data recording systems. It was a strange time when I was just in the process of setting up another company and I really only took the job because it paid well...my mind was mostly elsewhere, though.

I arrived at the place on my first day and was walking across the car park towards the building when I spotted another guy walking in roughly the same direction. It was one of those occassions when I looked at this other guy and - for no logical reason - took an immediate dislike to him, even though I didn't know who in hell he was. It turned out that the other guy was also starting work there as my junior on the same day. It turned out that if there was an Olympic event for asking dumb-ass questions, this guy would have more medals than Mark Spitz.

Anyway, this was back in Windows 3.11 time. We sat next to each other in the office mostly in silence except when his mouth was open and a dumb-ass question was coming out or when I was saying "don't open your mouth, dumb-ass, a question might leak out!" We got on like a house on fire...

Now and then amid the silence in which I tried to make sure we worked, one of our workstations would suddenly whirr into life and the disk access light would flicker. One day dumb-ass turned to me and said "I think there's something wrong with this PC, because it keeps doing that even though I'm not touchinig it", to which I responded "didn't you know? That's Bill Gates. He has a special patch built into Windows so that he can tap into all the computers of the world and find out what we're all doing. That way he can work out what he needs to build into the computers of the future so we won't be able to resist his will..."

Dumb-ass (being totally devoid of any sense of irony) immediately responded with some sort of "blah blah blah" straight as a die answer about it not actually being Bill Gates and how I was clearly wrong. I then punched him in the face and got on with my work.

I think dumb-ass is still working at the same god-damned place all these years later. I wonder if he's still watching the drive light on his computer...