REDMOND, WASHINGTON– A Washington man has recently passed away after waiting for his Internet Explorer browser to finish loading a page. The deceased man’s family says he was a dedicated Microsoft fan.
On Wednesday morning, police officers were dispatched to the home of Mike Rowe Softe, 24, whose parents reported him missing when he hadn’t responded to their last twenty emails.
According to authorities, Softe was found sitting at his old desktop CRT computer monitor with his face buried into his large wired keyboard. One of the officers at the scene stated that there was an Internet Explorer page loading on the monitor screen.
Investigators were called in to establish a time frame to show when Softe first clicked on the web page and how long he was waiting for it to load before he finally passed away from not eating, drinking, and suffering cardiac arrest from the stress.
After a thorough investigation, the head detective on the case surmised that Softe had been trying to connect to YouTube to watch a cat video and that the page had been loading for approximately eight days.
Softe’s family says he was a devoted Internet Explorer fan, and that he refused to switch to some of the more popular browsers, such as Google Chrome, Firefox, or Opera.
“We tried to reason with him,” said Softe’s distraught mother. “But he refused to give up his favorite browser. He told us Internet Explorer was the best browser since it’s been around for so long. I only wish we could’ve helped him with his addiction.”
Softe’s mother added, “Last year, our entire family got together and had an intervention for him, trying to get him to upgrade to a faster, more reliable browser with less security issues. After the intervention we didn’t hear from him for weeks. We all assumed he was angry, but we later found out he was just waiting for one of my emails to load.”
Police also found various unexplained items at the crime scene, such as floppy disks, a copy of Microsoft Office 95, and an autographed photo of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
A thorough examination of Softe’s desktop computer showed that it had been infected with spyware, adware, and computer viruses.
