The free Yahoo email I often use is itself annoying and sometimes slow moving, but it does do the necessary stuff and it isn’t plain text unless that’s what you want it to be.
Now here comes Google's new Gmail and it is just completely incomprehensible to me. They said it was a "test" version, but should have just called it a "make-do version that nobody but a computer nerd could like yet". The only advantage to being signed up now is just being signed up. And here I’d hurried along as if the world was full of people who wanted to be ratsouthern@gmail.com and they would’ve snapped up my cutesy email name before I could grab it! Oh, woe!
As if I wouldn’t be just as well amused to be dimgolly@ or googibble@ or fobweasel@ or kupoosh@ or shambuggle@ or nobtoodle@ or any number of things! Just so long as they don’t have ugly unimaginative numbers in it, I’m good to go.
But, meanwhile, I’ve rushed forward and I’m in it—I’m in the Gmail! But what’s this Google email for? I’m not saying that Gmail malfunctions, I don’t believe that it does. It just isn’t complete! If it is, they should say so clearly and cure me of my vast illusions!
If it would have started out a little more normal, if it had just SOME of the convenient and attractive features like Yahoo--it's main competitor, I presume, since they are both Free and both have advertising--it could clearly compete. On my machine, it's faster than Yahoo is as it changes from Inbox screen to Sent screen and so forth, but that's not enough. And surely nobody wants ONLY a big bucket of storage space. How much finger-licking chicken-fried space can I use, especially right at first? I already have access to an email system that’s plain vanilla and has more storage space than Yahoo and I don’t use it much because it’s disgustingly plain. “Plain” is not an attractive feature, all you Computer Creatures from the black lagoon!
GMAIL’S MISSING FEATURES
1. There’s no larger font. There’s just the small default. I want something LEGIBLE, people! Using View-Text Size-Large on the Internet menu bar above only produces chaotic lines of text, which is readable, but hard to read. I can be as lazy as Gmail’s beta designers any day, you know! I’m not going to hustle to translate their bug-headed eccentricities into a visible font! That was their job.
2. There are no different fonts.
3. There’s no colors for fonts.
4. There is no Bold,
5. no Italic,
6. no underline.
7. There’s no way of adding an automatic Signature.
8. Gmail doesn’t know what a link is so far. It doesn’t attempt to do anything with them. So I guess it isn’t a link!
9. Gmail mentions, but does not yet seem to support attachments. I can’t tell what’s happening with attachments.
10. Does not indicate the file size of message.
11. If you can block any addresses, I failed to find out how.
12. Gmail does all it can to DISCOURAGE you from deleting an email! Why?
They think because they have provided so much storage space for you, you'll never need to delete anything. I did eventually see the obtuse and obstructive manner in which they bury the explanation that it IS possible to Delete a message. This sort of thing is another reason why these computer geniuses are patent Stupid Smart People. Evidently they've never gotten mad at a friend, a lover, or a business and wanted to utterly delete them from the face of the earth, and this includes from your computer. These guys must be genuine nerds, people without lives, personalities, quarrels, resentments, or desires. That’s all I can figure. They’re stick figure stereotypes from a teenage ha-ha movie. Deleting emails is one of the small perverse Negative Pleasures in life, dammit! What business do they have to dissuade me from it?
As for Gmail’s wanting to get our feedback, I see little real evidence of that. Hey, if you want feedback, you don’t make it difficult for the dumb public, boy geniuses! The Help Files are there and you CAN find the well hidden “contact us” if you pursue it through a labyrinth. You’ll find a place eventually where you slog (no, not blog) laboriously through a process that emails your question to some Unknown Location! Rest assured, you never see the email address!
What is it with these chickenshit Email Companies that they don’t want you to know their email addresses or their street addresses? Yahoo does the same thing, and is quite proud of it. Why don’t they give us the addresss, THEN screw us over and fail to answer us? What they’ve got is a form of torture where they keep us thinking it’s Possible to get an answer, whereas it is NOT possible. Are they all commies that they would be so wary and secretive toward their own customers. Or—is it possible?—could they just be—I hesitate to speak it—some of that small elite, the Stupid Smart People?
Anyway, when you send your question, it takes a day or two to get an answer from a machine that answers nothing, that just claims it’s sterile fingers have now passed the question on to somebody (might be human, might not, they don’t say, they don’t HAVE to say) and then crows about how polite they think they’ve been about it all. They sent no such message to reassure me about my second complaint and inquiry, but why not? Maybe because “beta” is brain-damaged? Blithering commie idiots! Stupid Smart People!
Perhaps as Saltydog said a day or two ago when he welcomed the arrival of Gmail, this is a “beta” version and it'll all be improved later. He’s very relaxed and likes Gmail already because he uses that kind of default font, anyway, he said. He likes it plain, I guess. But as a regular Joe who's just a practiced user of email systems—I like to use those bells and whistles, the colors and fonts and so forth when they’re present. I have no comprehension of why anybody with all the money and energy and intelligence of Google would offer this bare bones version and claim it’s an email system that’s GOING to be good, that’s GOING to be revolutionary. Oh, ANYTHING might be marvelous later, Captain Kangaroo, but at present it’s a windup toy. It’s a storage box.
I always thought a beta version was a program that was fully developed, but not fully tested. I never thought it’d be a program with some of the major useful features intentionally left out! Three cheers for the Stupid Smart People!
They could offer me 10 trillion gigabytes, but if the system is this incomplete, how long am I going to suck it up and suffer Gmail's inadequacy? Not long. I won't delete Gmail; I’m not that stupid. I just won't use it. I may use it as a storage bin, of course. But IT’S NOT WORTH ANYTHING AS AN ACTIVE EMAIL unless you just want plain vanilla. I don’t want plain. I certainly don’t want small print! I'd thought they'd do much better, even for starters. I thought Google was much smarter than this. But I guess I never considered this “beta” nonsense. I guess I really didn’t know they still did it that way. Google just didn’t warn me off enough, I guess. They never meant to appeal to people like me. I’m just a Rube, that’s clear. Not an aficionado of the computer world, not a hep cat of any kind. Excuse me all to hell for breathing up the air that a lame pig could have used!
You know, I can’t think of any other industry that huffs itself up so proudly and crows, “Here’s the crappy version first, see how you like it!”
As of Sunday night late, it’s been some hours since Gmail could be used at all. You can open it and look at the Inbox, that’s all. Now, THAT must be the Beta at work! Maybe THIS is the answer to my complaints and questions! Either it’s crashed or it’s dead—I wonder which?
Oh, and by the way, someday this blog is going to be really well written, entertaining, and beautiful and we’ll give away free beer and prizes, possibly silver and gold. I think you should just hang on by your teeth until it gets there. Keep reading and don’t complain. No, I don’t know WHEN it’ll get better, just do as I tell you! Trust Me. You have been hypnotized, and I am now one of the Stupid Smart People. I know what’s good for you. You are feeling drowsy…
THE POET
His heart upon a platter,
He served it trim and neat.
In truth his heart was failing,
His heart’s hope frail and weak.
“You are so young,” one stranger asked,
“How can this possibly be?”
Another laughed and pointed
And asked him where it hurt.
In thunderstorms he snarled and fleetly rose
Above these questions of the flesh,
But in his dreams fat angels cried,
“The meat’s not fresh or sweet…”
By what excuse he came here
Those strangers might have asked,
But no one spoke or stirred again,
No one ever asked.
rcs.
Current draft: 02/23/03
Let’s not get too cocky, but it’s pretty much a fact, that sorry old Coming Attraction is coming Tomorrow… “The 17 Best-Known Root Causes of Bad Driving“
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
Error
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone. -- W.H. Auden
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Abandon hope, all ye who enter here! (At least put on your socks and pants.)