John Singer Sargent: An Artist at His Easel (1914)

"I was out-dated before this product was even released."

I'm terribly slow on the uptake these days. I seem to need more space and time than previously, and I find myself far less productive. Give me a deadline and I'm almost sure to miss it, usually for good reasons, but sometimes for lousy ones. For instance, I've been trying to learn how to use the new and "improved" GoogleDrive apps, and it's been an excruciating experience. They've been almost entirely redesigned, seemingly to impede performance improvement. I need to rediscover every function every time I try to use it. The passageway into the file list was hidden three or four layers beneath an unrelated link, so I often wander aimlessly. Doing anything takes longer and becomes more frustrating than I ever remember GoogleApps being capable of inducing before. I need a GracePeriod, acknowledgement that I’m typing with chopsticks, so everything will quite naturally take much longer than otherwise necessary. I am a beneficiary of this encumbering technology.

I need to forgive myself for my own unwanted trespasses. This places me in perilous positions. I may be the very soul of understanding when judging another's performance, but I lose a necessary distance when judging my own. I become unrelentingly harsh. So much so that I further degrade my performance. I feel forced to flee from the field, further delaying completion. I sometimes have to hide out, unable to face any further challenges. I need to recharge before re-engaging with the unavoidable humiliation. Some learning might be happening somewhere, but when I return with renewed optimism, I have to restart figuring out how to bring up that file list again. The continuing torture hardly seems reinforcing. It's unrelenting!

I imagine that one day—probably not today and also probably not tomorrow, but one day—I will probably gain some entry-level measure of proficiency. Still, from my current vantage point, that point seems like pure fantasy. The clever designers at Google must have studied how to produce the most annoyingly opaque user interface. They leave no clue, and they've been stingy with graphics. The ones they do present do not seem to carry iconic significance. They deepened the mystery and further distanced my assimilation. They have created a composition that utterly vanquishes intuition. However I previously found my way through production proves to be the wrong way to determine paths through. They seem to demand an absolutely orthogonal orientation, impossible to imagine beforehand. I stumble upon secret passages only to quickly extinguish all knowledge and memory of them. I'm forever asking The Muse how to get somewhere again or accomplish some function. The interface seems to erase all footprints from earlier excursions.

I think the Doc app was designed after Word, which remains one app that, as a writer, I could never use. It proved by far the most hostile environment ever devised for the creation of prose, though GoogleDocs might be closing the gap. It features far too many features to be useful to those of us uninterested in graphic design. It, too, hides essential features within the most unobvious links. It was also a Microsoft product designed for a two-button mouse world, a world I've never acknowledged. I randomly select between the buttons without seeing much influence on results. Google went to the dark side, choosing to follow the more backward lead when designing for the masses. They might have chosen to make their product usable but didn't. They chose to make it seem familiar to the largest number of potential users. That most might find their product anything other than eternally baffling deeply disturbs me. That more imprinted on that schema for computing than the more intuitive one leaves people like me wondering and falling ever further behind. It certainly seems to have shortened my path toward personal obsolescence. I was outdated before this product was released and desperately needed more extended GracePeriods. Now I need even more.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz