And by "They" I mean Webstrainer. And by "Us" I mean the people who pay money to use their site.

I don't know anyone for whom their monitor's available real estate, measured horizontally, is not incredibly precious. Scrolling up and down on web pages is something most of us are resigned to doing and certainly if we're excited about the content, we don't mind scrolling to read it.

But having to scroll from left-to-right, in order to see a whole line of text or a web page's content offerings? I know of noone that does not annoy.*

One of the key features of Webstrainer's new UI is a left-hand nav bar you're supposed to use to move around inside of your account. Even minimized, it sucks up valuable horizontal real estate, but all of your navigation has to be done from that bar, so you're constantly minimizing--restoring--minimizing. Clumsy and amateurish.

The new interface has been a nightmare to use for the last week. The content in the window does not automatically resize to fit the window. (I can only assume someone new to the concept of "frames" made a critical design error and their internal beta-testers are all using 27" monitors and didn't notice.)

I select a line of data and by the time I scroll over to the right, to see the information I care about (they've hard-coded several useless columns of data and fixed them at the beginning of each line, so you have to scroll) I've either lost track of which teeny line of data** I was trying to follow, or, in some cases, it's taken so long for the interface to refresh the view that I've completely forgotten which category I selected and what it was I wanted to look at.

I was already cranky, having been told that not only was I required to be present all day next Saturday at the stupid Gathering O'The Nuts, but that I have to give them Thursday evening, part of the day on Friday, and Saturday evening (unless they buy my excuse of a previous engagement) as well.

NewBoss Anais asked me, quite seriously and earnestly, if I didn't think I'd be interested in hearing the presentations. I'm afraid I momentarily forgot my Company Manners--looking at her in bewilderment and replying, "I'm not going to be here that much longer."

She didn't seem to get it--but doesn't it seem logical that, no, I would not care about the ins-and-outs of the workings of a company I'm about to leave?

Anyhow. I grasped the essential point, which is that it's not optional.

Bleah.

But today is payday, so today's a pretty good day.

I think I had a peak moment just now, with the announcement that Zappos has a discount website now. 6pm.

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* A few months ago, they rolled out a new customized "home page" design that featured--wait for it--a left-hand nav bar you were supposed to use to move around inside of your home pages! You couldn't minimize it, and the bar was hard-coded to take up about 20% of the horizontal space. A storm of bitter protests from users had no effect.

** And I do mean "teeny." I have to set the zoom on the browser window to 80% to see an entire line of data at once, but by then it displays in 6pt type. Since I'm looking at numerical data, the inability to tell if a number is '0' or '6' or even '8'--this is something of a problem.