Images via Aerrix
A few days ago, user Aerrix posted on Reddit that she had won Secret Santa. That’s because she had taken part in Reddit’s annual gift exchange, and instead of receiving a nice holiday gift from just any old stranger on the Internet, she got a package in the mail from the richest person in the world: Bill Gates.
This is nothing new of course. The co-founder of Microsoft has been taking part in these exchanges for several years now. The tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist (or someone who works for him) gifts someone a bunch of stuff that’s tailored to whatever preferences they listed when signing up, with the addition of a donation made in their name to a related charity or relief organisation. Then the person receives the package, does a double-take when they realise it’s from Gates, and proceeds to rave about their haul to the Internet.
Which is what happened with Aerrix, who, being a big gamer and huge fan of Nintendo, found herself now in possession of everything ranging from an Xbox One and Zelda mittens for her dog to an NES Classic.
That’s one way to get your hands on the nostalgia machine that’s still sold out most places, or being resold at incredibly marked up prices through sites like Ebay. A representative for Bill Gates confirmed to IGN that the package was indeed authentic.
Aerrix described the experience of winning the Secret Santa lottery unwrapping each gift in detail, finally writing,
“Merry Christmas to all yall out there, and to Mr. Gates, who has the biggest heart and REALLY KNOWS HOW TO TREAT A GIRL TO SOME VIDEO GAMES (and video game paraphernalia)! I’m just blown away by his generosity, which went even further than all these gifts because he submitted a donation to code.org in my name to give more students the chance to learn computer science, which is AWESOME because it’s something near and dear to my heart as my husband is a programmer and my brother has a degree in computer science!
Thank you SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO much Mr. Gates! I’ll never EVAR forget this Christmas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 😀 😀 :D”
You can see the rest of her Secret Santa saga documented here.
Comments
10 responses to “Redditor Signs Up For Secret Santa, Gets Bill Gates”
And a dog too, awesome!
I actually really like Bill Gates as far as tech entrepreneurs go. Him and his wife are really making the world a better place with their philanthropy projects.
However I did just have a chuckle and wonder what his response would be if he got me [or someone similar] as a secret santa giftee. Most of my subreddits [and the interests listed in my profile] all revolve around linux/bsd, open source software, computing freedom, and removal of reliance on proprietary software.
Not that any of the gifts are necessarily opposed to that, but I wonder what the founder of the largest software/computing racket in the world would think about gifting to that sort of a person, and what sort of gifts that would entail.
Congrats to that lucky person, anyway 🙂
I think you are selling MS a bit short. They did bring PC’s to the masses. Just about every family I know started off with an early Windows PC.
The other thing is is that MS knows how to build an ecosystem. I know I can reliably run a business from top to bottom with the Microsoft stack, and that its products will 99% of the time work together. You can’t say the same about OS sadly.
You can say that with Linux/BSD et al. though.
If you want to run a full MS stack, best of fortunes to you. The thing that gets me is that MS have the market cornered and they fully exploit that with their pricing model. So many people use microsoft products because that’s all they have ever known. I absolutely understand how intimidating it must be to completely start from scratch with another computing environment that differs greatly from the windows way of doing things.
And this again ties into MS’s model. Get people into their products early, so they don’t have a desire to start from scratch somewhere else. I wish people were exposed to more options right from the start, so that there was some actual choice and competition in the decision making process.
I work in both stacks, so I’m not exactly an evangelist, but with nix stacks I need to go thru multiple vendors and combine multiple products to get a full stack.
As for cost, we’ve found that what you often don’t pay in licensing, you usually make up for in having to pay Sys and DevOp costs and ridiculous support contracts. And MS licensing is getting rather cheap for most things these days anyway.
The biggest problem we have is MS is usually 2 years minimum behind the game, but when it finally drops, it integrates much better.
That photo of Bill Gates suspiciously looks photoshopped….
Yes. It is. The redditor mentioned that Gates shopped himself (or had someone shop him) into one of their photos he acquired.
Article doesn’t mention this but the original reddit post did.
Last time i did a secret santa back in primary school all i got was a 50c pen and diary set even though there was a $2 minimum, everyone else got something awesome.
There’s always someone who gets shafted. I twice received nothing.