In This Economy?

As if Vista wasn’t bad enough, this latest bit of news just came out of PC land, aka Microsoft.

From CNN Money: In a letter this weekend, Microsoft (MSFT) is telling some of its laid off employees it overpaid their severance. Won’t they please write out a check payable to “Microsoft Corporation” and send some of it back?

You can check out the entire letter, in all its audacious glory, here.

Now, Microsoft apparently paid 25 people anywhere from $4,000 – $5,000 extra, which means at MOST, the company that made $16.63 billion in its second quarter is fighting for $125,000. Wow. Really?

So, I spent some time today trying to craft a response, you know, if this had happened to me. Before I had gotten much more than “fuck you, Bill Gates,” Microsoft had issued an apology and is no longer asking for the money to be returned — so I’ll give them some credit (though, only an iota).

This has apparently caused some debate on the Interwebs:  keep the money that technically isn’t yours, or send it back? According to a ZDNet blogger, in an unofficial poll of more than 12,000 readers, a whopping 72 percent said they would keep the money and make Microsoft sue to get it back.

Personally, I’d probably send it back, but I’d be pretty pissed off about it.  I might even send my aforementioned response letter along with that check. But that’s me. How about it, ITE-ers? In This Economy, would you keep the money?

Tags: Bill Gates, laid off, Microsoft, refund

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 6:02 PM and is filed under Bad News, WTF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.