Lest you develop the impression from my last few posts, gentle reader, that I am a one-dimensional, Windows-hating Mac fanboy, rest assured that my reservoir of bile is nearly inexhaustible, and certainly sufficient to allow a liberal spew of disdain over all major contemporary operating systems and their associated applications.

Take, for example, iWeb. I’ve never found it very useful, but that’s primarily because I’m already comfortable with a more technical suite of applications, comprised chiefly of BBEdit, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and WordPress. Though I eschew iWeb as a development tool, its merits are nonetheless readily discernable; in a nutshell, it makes website creation very easy for users who know nothing about HTML, Javascript, XML, RSS, AJAX, or any other dollop of the alphabet soup in which the modern Web floats, and no reason or motivation to learn about it.

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Since Entourage vanished from my MacBook Pro I decided to go ahead and install Office 2008, something that was on the “to do” list anyhow. I mount the disk image and launch the installer. After the usual oblivious, perfunctory clicking through the license agreement that has probably locked the seventh-born of my eldest child into an unfathomably sinister pact with the underworld, the installer “recommended” I quit all running applications before continuing, ostensibly because of possibly instability due to font changes.

With the exception of Fireworks, the applications I was running at the time—Safari, Firefox, Mail, Terminal, TextWrangler, and Chicken of the VNC— were not likely to be affected by any Microsoft-specific font changes. Nonetheless, I figured I’d wait to install Office 2008.

But there wasn’t any “Cancel” button. The Escape key did nothing. Clicking the window-closing icon on the title bar had no effect. Ah, how about selecting “Quit Installer” from the Installer menu? Ignored. The only remedy was to force-quit the installer. How do the UI analysts at Microsoft manage to keep their jobs?

No doubt having read yesterday’s post, the Redmond Mob decided I needed to be taught a lesson. Now, what’s the quickest way to hose somebody’s day in a contemporary office environment?

Why, screw up his e-mail, of course. (I suppose a better, more comprehensive method would be to bork his domain controller, but thankfully we’re not in an AD environment here.)

Today my morning routine went like this:

1. Run in the door, start the MBP.
2. Launch Entourage.
3. Watch as Microsoft AutoUpdate launches. AutoUpdate wants me to quit Entourage to continue. Seems reasonable. I do so.
4. Auto-Update keeps displaying the dialog about quitting Entourage despite my just having quit the application.
5. I dismiss the dialog, but it reappears about twenty times, each time halting the AutoUpdate process.
6. After much curse-laden clicking, AutoUpdate is finally satisfied that Entourage has indeed been quit. The update process runs, then beachballs and hangs, requiring a Force-Quit.
7. Ha ha! Many laffs are now for the having. Entourage is gone. As in rm -fP gone.

Arrrrgh!

Microsoft’s update processes have been vexing me sorely of late. Last night I applied a .NET framework update to my XP gaming rig, one that required a reboot to take effect. Since I did not wish to interrupt my work in progress at the time, I elected not to reboot. A short while later, XP threw up another dialog advising me that I needed to reboot for the previously-mentioned update to take effect. I clicked “Restart Later” and went on about my business. That business, as it happened, was playing TF2.

Ten minutes into play, the same goddamn nag screen interrupted my game. Again, I told it to Restart Later. Ten minutes later, it happened again. Goddamn it, Windows! I thought I told you to shut up.

Apparently this bullshit is not exactly new. How I managed to avoid encountering until now is anybody’s guess. This is terrible UI. When a user tells an application or system to fuck off, that application or system should proceed to fuck right off, period. “Restart Later” should not mean “nag me again in ten minutes, ad infinitum”; it should mean “shut the hell up for the remainder of this user session”. Who’s the retard in Redmond making these design decisions?

It’s official. I have nothing to offer my fellow man. Time for me to hang it all up. I can no longer maintain even the laughably thin façade of mediocrity I’ve managed to cower behind until now.

I know this because somebody finally mustered the courage to break the hard truth to me this morning. I suppose my colleagues have just been too nice to tell me. Thank goodness for the unflinching honesty of complete strangers! The conversation went like this:

User: “I’ve got a problem with one of the voice lines you guys set up for me.”
Me: “OK, what’s the number we’re dealing with?”
User: “I don’t know.”
Me: “OK… what’s the number printed on the wall jack?”
User: “I don’t know. There isn’t one.”
Me: “Um… alright… what building are you in?”
User: “[Name of 300+ voice line building]”
Me: “Great. What room number?”
User: “I don’t know. Can’t you look it up?”
Me: “Not without a jack number, no.”
User: *makes exasperated sound*
Me: “Is there a number printed on a nearby jack? A plate on the door?”
User: “Look, this is in the big room on the first floor. Just look it up!”
Me: “Sir, I need more information than ‘the big room’. We don’t have floor plans here, just voice and data network schematics.”
User: “Jesus Christ.” *mumbles angrily*
Me: “…”
User: “Look, I need this line to be analog, not digital.”
Me: “Well, we can help with that, but first we need to know which line we’re dealing with!”
User: “You’re worthless.” *click*
Me: “…”

Well, one of us is worthless, anyway.