September 16, 2008

New Post Type: Frustration

Frustration - a deep chronic sense or state of insecurity and dissatisfaction arising from unresolved problems or unfulfilled needs

I find myself irritated by a variety of frustrations that plague my working environment. I work as a contractor for the Department of Defense. My work helps me to understand that there is no evil master plan being cooked up by a vast governmental conspiracy. How do I know? Conspiracy requires a minimal level of competence that does not appear to exist in this environment.

Little things seem to be more and more irritating to me these days. Perhaps it is my advancing age (whose age isn't advancing? [Merlin - ok, you got me, name a non-fictional character]). For example: Web applications. Is it so hard for web developers to add a timeout script to their interfaces that will warn me, the user, that my session has expired and that the screen I'm looking at is no longer usable?

It REALLY SUCKS to sit and use a beautiful Flash, Java or DHTML interface for 3 minutes designing my input into the system, only to be given a 'Your session expired and your input has been thrown away' message when hitting submit.

Has computer technology devolved so much that we can't add a clock to the friggin' interface with a countdown timer to when the page is no longer going to be valid?

1 comment:

Matthew said...

Actually what you really want is periodic save of user input in progress, via ajax. Wordpress has it for the post text, but it isn't something you see very often in webapps. The warning won't help unless you are willing and able to act fast, like if you had walked away from the machine to answer the phone.