Friday, November 24, 2006

The angry upgrade

Sometimes technology pisses me off. Take Blogger, for instance, the usually lovely, user-friendly program that hosts this plethora of useless information. It is picky about photos, doesn't allow videos and requires outages at the weirdest times. But lately, Blogger has become a nag.

Blogger, which is owned by Google, repeatedly expressed the wish that I upgrade to beta. First it was a tentative suggestion in little copy at the bottom of the screen. Then it became a message that I had to ignore before I could post. This week, it became upgrade or die.

Part of the upgrade process included signing up for a Google e-mail account. Now I have a work e-mail, Yahoo e-mail, an old Hotmail account, an e-mail account the hubby set up that I have never used and a fucking google account. Fine, whatever.

But yesterday I went to leave a comment on another users blog and was DENIED! Why, oh why the injustice!?? you scream at your computer screen. Well, obviously the other user has not upgraded and I can only leave comments on accounts that use the new beta Blogger.

What ....... the ....... fuck. Pissed does not adequately describe my emotions at the time.

I hate to be manipulated, emotionally or otherwise. And here I am being forced to upgrade, set up a stupid new e-mail account AND nag my friends to upgrade so I can continue to leave titilating comments on their blogs. This is just wrong. So, I sent the following message to the Blogger Help Group.

Attention Nazi-controlled "free" blog service

I am writing to express my frustration, outrage and general dis-ease with your manipulative upgrade tactics. For two years I have enjoyed -- with limits -- blogging on the World Wide Web, but your insistence on upgrading to a beta format and then restricting my comment freedom has gone too far. This aggression will not stand!

I demand you return my rights as a free thinker to leave comments throughout the Internet as God intended without reprecussion or mercy.

I refuse to succumb to Communist-style methods to coerce my co-writers to upgrade to your pitiful beta program in order to relish my tidbits of wisdom. I will e-mail them directly instead!

I don't know how you sleep at night.

Sincerely, Michele c/o ooogoodgod@gmail.com


That will show them.

By the way, feel free to e-mail me shit. I might as well use the damn account now that I have it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You expect me to believe that a company whose motto is "Don't be Evil" would attempt something so outrageous?

Alan said...

I upgraded today just so we were on the same version. I ended up getting annoyed when I came here and I wasn't able to post a comment. =(