New Blogger?

So Blogger claims to be "New and Improved." Strangely enough, I was actually quite pleased to finally see this news. I haven't been using my blogger account for months because of an annoying quirk, so I figured that finally "they" had fixed it.

Sadly, they haven't. Somehow it always seems that the things we figure "they" will take care of are never really taken care of. Perhaps this is precisely because we can only refer to them with the most generic term "they." We have no idea who "they" actually are, so we can't really complain about them to anyone. Nor can we take our business elsewhere, since, for all we know, "they" are the ones running elsewhere too!

I can't write a post which is longer than a certain number of characters (which I have no intention of counting). If I exceed the unknown limit, I get a screwy "DONE" message and the post fails to actually post. For some reason e-mailing my posts frees me from this limit, and I can ramble on for as long as I want. (By the by, this seems to be a universal feature of e-mail judging by the incredibly long and tedious messages people are wont to send. Except the folks promising to enlarge, um, "it" for me. These messages are usually very terse. Ironic.)

Anyway, multiple e-mails exchanged with Blogger help got me nowhere. "They" never seemed to understand what I was telling them, or they simply chose to ignore it, sending me advice on topics that were at best only tangentially related to what I was writing about.

Then I realized that I was not, in fact, communicating with a real person. It was an artificial intelligence program, designed to scan messages for key words and then fire back the "best match" from the FAQ database or the Guinness Book of Records. This explains why its advice included tips on the largest pile of AOL installation CD's along with the recommendation that I shove my finger into a USB port really hard while whistling "Mandy.