Dance Monkey Boy! DANCE!

See Steve dance. Dance Steve dance!

Wow. Every now and then you find something on the net, an image, an audio file, a video, that you know you shouldn’t have access to, but it’s out there and you can’t resist watching/listening to it. You know the stuff – the recording of that poor guy panicking about his missing hard drive, that footage of a guy bashing his computer in frustration, etc etc.

Well a couple of days ago I stumbled across this post at System 26 (link now dead):

They have an mpeg video file of Steve Ballmer (very high up guy at Microsoft – CEO?) appearing at an internal seminar/pep rally/motivational brainwashing session. Now I’m no anti-Microsoft bigot, I purchase and use a lot of their software, but this video has to be seen to be believed.

Note that (ironically?) I couldn’t get it to play in Windows Media Player at all – but it worked fine in Quicktime 5.

What does the video contain? Well, Mr Ballmer arrives onto the stage so pumped up with adrenaline (at least, I’m assuming he was up on adrenaline) that he spends a long, long minute jumping around the stage, shrieking “woo!” and “give it up for me!”, stabbing the air with his finger. Mr Ballmer is not a small man, and at one point in the video he clearly hurts his foot, but he carries on (and on) like a trooper.

This man is probably one of the most powerful men in the global computer industry, as well as one of the wealthiest I believe, and yet there he is – his voice shrieking in a high-pitched imitation of a Jerry Springer audience member, jumping and skipping around the stage. Holding his arm high, revealing his sweaty underarms to the room (and now the world), and telling everyone “I. Love. This. Company. Yeees!”

I can’t stop watching it.

It… It’s…

Terrifying.