SlashNOT

MZ writes: When Mike Ferguson absentmindedly pulled his iPod out of his pocket during a weekly team meeting for the Microsoft Project group, his boss went into convulsions, thus saving the group from a four-hour recanting of the litany of milestones that were relevant to almost no one there. Later that day, in the offices of Microsoft Press, Assistant editor July Nordom dropped her iPod shuffle onto the foot of senior vice president Nancy Newmar, immediately burning a shuffle-shaped hole onto her nubuck pumps and sending the V.P. to the hospital for burn treatment. Lucas Warner was able to effectively drown out the shouts of development team leader Brian Garder using his trademark white iPod earbuds after failing to debug fully before checking code back into the repository. To stem the tide of iPod related injuries, Microsoft cited these examples when it banned the iPod from its campus, forcing users to go without music or use a Windows Media player instead.