Bonzi Buddy
This weeks rant: Bonzi Buddy! You know, that annoying program that infects your computer with all kind of useless crap like the special “web compass” which serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever except to annoy you by taking up more window space. You’ve never heard of Bonzi Buddy? Well if someone mentions it while you’re within 50 feet of a computer either hit them with something heavy or run away post haste. Now, about all the “wonderful assets” as the readme puts it of Bonzi Buddy:
-Bonzi Buddy thinks for itself! I can recognize when you’re playing a game of Half-Life and really need to have sound and come swinging onto your screen either annihilating your game completely or stealing the sound away permanently until you start the game again.
-Bonzi Buddy can talk to you whenever you want! That’s right, if you want to hear what sounds like a cross between Arnold Schwartzenegger, a robot, someone from Jamaica, and Mr. Rogers babbling about buying BonziBuddy gold so that you can PAY to have him sing and stop mentioning his addon pack at every opportunity.
-Bonzi Buddy immediately assumes that it’s the most important thing on your computer and thus sets your homepage to bonzibuddy.com, puts it on the top of your favourites list, and steals CPU power from programs that need it.
-Bonzi Buddy comes with an “extremely useful” (read: utterly useless) bargain hunter so you can hunt for bargains instead of actually finding them
-Bonzi Buddy really learns from you! Yes, he learns what you’re currently doing and soars directly in front of it on his stupid little vine trying to get you to use him instead of whatever you were working on. He also learns what you buy, where you live, what type of computer you have, and just about everything else on your computer so that he can send it to the evil corporation behind his construction.
The worst part about Bonzi buddy is that he won’t go away, EVER! No matter how much stuff you delete or how many time you click his uninstall button and “uninstall” the program the Purple Monkey from Hell will always be sitting in front of what you were doing silently laughing at your bad fortune and relentlessly trying to get you to buy his add-on packs. He’ll only stop when you get so used to hearing it that you sleepwalk to your computer and buy it while you’re unaware and unconscious. If someone were to make a Shotgun Buddy for windows that would allow you to waste him every time he appeared on your screen I guarantee that they would be rich beyond imagining, I know I would buy it.