Thursday, September 05, 2013

will no-one save me from this clip art hell

I am downloading clip-art daily. I have been driven into this dismal corner (bright with the indefinably awful smiles of the determinedly generic) by the strong-arm package bundling of a prominent clip-art sales site. I delegated the purchase decision to a staff member who was briefly passing through. He left me this. The site is extensive, but most of it is very badly tagged. A depressing number of pages toss away their descriptive space on misspellings and waste words like handsome, beautiful, fresh, sexy, pretty, etc. I go back to chasing search terms through a maze of the scrubbed and filtered, trying to find the word for what I'm looking for. It's a perfect tidy-up job for the Mechanical  Turk, but why would they bother? Forced constant overpayment has me doing the work.

Later, I am trying to show the new staff member Google Analytics. But there is a clip art woman who is stopping me getting to Google Analytics. She smiles gently while I wrestle with my log-in. The browser crashes, like a floundering brontosaur. She doesn't even bother making a snide comment about the paucity of my updates or the make and antiquity of my browser. She just stands there, smiling, using most of my screen, while I stab at the log-in button (now hidden in a tiny ribbon at the top of the screen).

Eventually I get in. Everything's been redesigned, again, in that "you can use me on an i-pad!" look, all shiny, rounded, tasteful and empty like a flagship store no-one can afford to visit. I grind my teeth and get to re-navigating the menus.

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