Friday, July 29, 2011

A new scale for a new century.

After doing some yardwork (which involved hacksawing off the ends of trees), I took off my hoody and shoes in preparation for showering off all the leaf-gunk. I took my iPhone out of my pcoket and briefly checked Twitter in case someone had replied to me. They had not, but I spotted a tweet from @punky_and_me with the word "Amazeballs" on it, a word I had used in a tweet the previous day, so I was intrigued and clicked the link. It was a link to the mobile page version of a blog post featuring amazing claymation art from Etsy. I really liked one part, so I went to leave a comment. Tapped "Leave a comment". I typed my comment into the field on the mobile version of the comments page. It asked me what ID I wanted to used, I choose my Google ID then pushed "post". I was then taken to the non-mobile-web version of the comments page with a suddenly-blank comments field. I dutifully retyped my comment, and filled in the Captcha, which was something like "Cohardleb", then pushed "post". However, in the time it took for my finger to go from typing to "post" my iPhone autocorrected "Cohardleb" to "cohabitable". The page then spat me back to the comments page, where I had to carefully re-enter a new Captcha, aptly "RitardSm", then pressed post again. I was the redirected to a Google log-in page where I needed to enter my email address and password. Then hit submit.

Finally, it posted. This whole thing took 7-9 minutes of frustrated pecking at my phone. For one two-line comment.

I reached a 6.5 on the Tanjabraun Scale of Anger-At-Technology (similar to the Rounsaville scale for measuring racism).

So far, in this dimension, the only event which has caused a full 10.0 Tanjabrauns was a left-ward swipe on the trackpad of a Sony Vaio laptop being interpreted as "back" on a browser, in which sat a 10-page blog post that it had taken the better part of 2 hours to write.

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