Fed up with people coming to ‘his’ country and refusing to learn the language, 39 year old Mick Jones, an administration worker from Melbourne, decided to take the issue into his own hands. Taking up camp outside the JB Hi-fi on Bourke St, Mr Jones chanted slogans and held up placards reading “Speak my language or go back where you came from” and “This is Australia not America: get it right Gates”.
When quizzed as to why he was protesting, Mr Jones explained that in his job working in administration for an unnamed company, he was constantly frustrated by the spell checker in Microsoft Word using the American dictionary. “I should be able to write words like colour and aluminium without being hounded down by that annoying red line” he began, “ I feel like they’re coming here and trying to force their own language upon us. This is Australia, not America dammit! I don’t even know if I’m supposed to use an ‘s’ or a ‘z’ in words like ‘organised’ anymore, and when someone pointed out that I had been spelling ‘defence’ the American way I just snapped”.
When asked as to why he chose to protest outside a retail store which was completely separate from Microsoft itself, Mr Jones replied “Well I didn’t know where the Melbourne headquarters of Microsoft was, or if there even was one, so I decided to make my stand at the nearest place to my work which sold computers. Plus I needed some cds”.
When asked to respond to Mr Jones’s protest, a store employee stated that he “Had nothing to do with it”, but suggested that he try setting the dictionary settings to Australian English.
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‘Clippy’ faces deportation if he doesn’t get some spelling help himself
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Mr Jones angrily responded that it either reset back to the American dictionary or contained American spellings in the Australian dictionary anyway, to which the employee stated “Well what do you expect? This is a company whose security patches frequently make the security of their software worse”.
The Gillard government has so far failed to respond to questions regarding the protest. However, when quizzed on the matter, Mr Abbot stated that Microsoft’s refusal to learn the language was of grave concern to the community, stating that it was the responsibility of those coming to this country to learn the language, and that he therefore supported Mr Jones in his protest. He promised to take action if elected, and refused to rule out deporting Microsoft if it continued to oppose learning the correct language.
The 'Strine 