{"id":5931,"date":"2014-03-24T00:01:36","date_gmt":"2014-03-24T07:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=5931"},"modified":"2014-03-22T13:48:01","modified_gmt":"2014-03-22T20:48:01","slug":"heres-your-92-digit-code-number","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=5931","title":{"rendered":"Here’s Your 92-Digit Code Number"},"content":{"rendered":"

After my computer Monster X<\/em> died, I bought a new system and re-installed my software. That process included re-installing my copy of Microsoft Office 2013. Alas, the product key — which I dutifully kept — was not longer valid.
\n
\nI’ve never had a product key rejected before, so the experience was new to me.<\/p>\n

The weird thing is that you can get quite far into the installation process before you discover that the key is invalid. I actually had Word open and up on the screen when I was informed that the key had already been used and the Microsoft police were on their way to my house.<\/p>\n

Just kidding.<\/p>\n

The remedy for such a situation is to phone up Microsoft and do a manual authorization. I’ve never done that before, so I figured I could justify the double-use of the key by explaining to them how my beloved computer Monster X<\/em> just died. I wasn’t stealing anything!<\/p>\n

To my surprise, there were no questions asked. I merely had to rattle off a 92-digit number to some gal in India whom I just flat-out could not understand. She was very sweet, and tried to help as best as someone could when dealing with Americans from Bangalore at 3:00 AM her local time. And she was just reading a script too, so we had no interaction beyond what was written for her to say.<\/p>\n

So I never got to explain my predicament: She merely took the number I read from my screen and then handed me over to an automated voice that would read to me another 92-digit number I had to type in. Once the number was typed, Office would be up and running. Simple, or so I thought.<\/p>\n

The robot voice spoke too rapidly. Granted, I didn’t have to type those weird product key letters — K, V, X, Z, W, Q — which I’m certain are chosen because you no human can touch-type such sequences. The Microsoft robot merely rattled off the 92 digits in clumps of 8. If I mistyped one or wanted to confirm, I couldn’t stop the damn robot voice.<\/p>\n

Worse: Because the robot was interactive, if I accidentally uttered something, it simply skipped over a group of numbers. So it was reading to me Group C when I hadn’t yet typed in Group B. I said, “Wait!” and then the robot skipped to Group D. To fix the problem, I started cursing. While that made me feel better, it didn’t help the robot.<\/p>\n

After lots of frustration, and phrases that would make a sailor blush, I did get Office verified.<\/p>\n

The weird thing is, no one bothered to verify whether I legitimately owned my copy of Office. I could have been anyone phoning in to register. So perhaps the Bad Guys haven’t yet figured that one out, or they’re just clever enough to bypass the registration process. Either way, after reflection, I thought the entire process a silly and pointless ordeal — but I got my Office 2013 back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hope you never have to endure the ordeal of a manual Microsoft product authorization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5931"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5963,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5931\/revisions\/5963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}