I hate when that happens. 2:45 on Thursday afternoon of the week when I'm "free" to work on my actual job and abruptly I was just--over it. Bored with it all.

I read the news headlines until I was sick of them, read blogs until all the opinions were starting to blur in my mind, checked out all the polls (no new information), watched the Twitter election feed until I was dizzy, played the "How Many Countries" game (64), checked my personal email (four times), and still had two hours to kill until I could go home. I was almost desperate enough to start playing computer games, but not quite. (The ones I have on this computer are all mind-numbingly boring anyhow.)

I browsed "how to save money to use to pay off your debt sites" for a while, until I realized I'm already doing all of those things that I intend to do (pay cash, cancel unneeded services like land lines, stop eating out frequently, think twice--then three times--before spending money on "wanna have" items) and that nothing anyone can say is going to make me do any of the other steps they recommend (cook all my meals from scratch instead of buying prepared food, cancel the cable tv service and lose access to the only 2-3 channels with shows I actually watch).

I started to go look at--something. I forget what, because when the browser window came up, my familiar, useful iGoogle page had been replaced with some kind of evil alien clone.

!!

Some evil, alien clone-maker at Google decided that the real estate on a computer monitor was wasted on, you know, things people want to be able to read, so they moved the tabs from the top of the page to the side--squishing up the original content to make room. (Tabs at the top - approx 1/2" of space in a horizontal strip. Tabs at the side - approx 2-1/2" of real estate all down the left-hand side of the screen.)

Naturally that pissed me off, so I went looking for some kind of anti-alien clone weapon (or, code) to use against the evil programmers who thought they were entitled to make any changes they wanted to their own product.

Voila! A mere one hour and fifteen minutes later, I have my old iGoogle back and only another 45 minutes to kill before I can go home!

Some days, I'm almost embarrassed to take money for sitting here.