Mac fan's blog leads to layoff in Redmond

A temp worker at Microsoft's in-house print shop appears to have lost his job as a result of his two biggest passions - Macs and blogging.

Earlier this week, Michael Hanscom posted a picture of several Power Mac G5s being off-loaded outside of the MSCopy print facility. Four days later, someone at Microsoft caught wind of the blog post and asked that Hanscom be removed from his position doing temp work for Xerox in the Microsoft shop.

"In the end, what it boils down to was a slight misjudgment on my part," Hanscom wrote in a fresh globule. "While I (and many other people) may find Microsoft's reaction to be extreme and unnecessary, chances are they had every legal right to make the decision that they did. I would certainly have preferred that they simply request that I take the offending post down (which I would have done in a heartbeat), but for whatever reasons, they chose not to take that route."

Microsoft's reaction may seem a tad harsh. The company does have a Mac Business Unit, which produces software for Apple computers. It's no shocker that Redmond would want some of Apple's latest and greatest kit. Clearly, however, the company did not like a temp worker eyeing its loading docks and then running home to blog about it to strangers.

At the MSCopy shop, Hanscom worked on electronic document setups for various applications such as Word, Excel, Photoshop and InDesign. He characterized the job as "a lot of fun, even if I do spend a lot of time grumbling at Microsoft's software."

No fan of the Beast, the Seattle resident was done in by his Mac fanaticism and globbing tendencies. This should be a lesson for us all.

The temp worker now finds himself in the ranks of the unemployed and has no shame about trying to cash in on his Warholian moment.

"Now, I've never been much of one for asking for money — I'm quite stubborn by nature (according to my parents, one of my first words as a child was "self!"), and generally, if I can't handle something on my own, well, that's just the way it goes," he writes.

"That said, however…(oh, sure, first the disclaimers, then the heart rending plea for help, complete with a John Williams score — oh, can I get Steven Spielberg to direct the TV spot?)…I have had a PayPal donation button in my about page for months now, as well as the Amazon links at the bottom of each page. To date, these have netted me all of — hold on, let me check — approximately $12 from my Amazon Associates account, and absolutely nothing from the PayPal button."

Nice try. ®