The Unfortunate Integration and Merger of Technology

As most of society is googlely-eyed and awestruck by the advances in technology, there are a few people out there who were perfectly content with the current standard.

As a standard, the technology industry re invents something every 3 months. This being said it is widely understood that you by a computer and by the time you get it home out of the box it is already out of date. The side that most people do not see as an advancement in is the developer side of the technology. This is the little things that happen in the changing of 2 lines of code to make something run more efficiently.

I came across a quite infuriating problem over the weekend with a web based company that I am a very loyal customer and supporter of.

Many months ago my University decided that it would like to move all student email accounts over to a Gmail (Google Mail) based system. Being a loyal supporter I was freaking ecstatic at the opportunity that my email can now be moved out of the University's fossilized computer technology. 

I was basically a kid in a online candy store:

Me when I saw that the migration happened

They even came up with a clever name. "Catmail" University of Arizona Wildcats and Gmail put together. Now I could get both my Gmail and Catmail on my phone, it was much user friendly and basically all around made the entire student body happy. Having two tabs open so I could multi task the emails was a very very nice way to keep life organized and keep work and personal life separated.

Over the weekend the some developer changed around 4 lines of HTML Code and now I cry at night. The exact lines of ode that were changed I could not tell you, but you can now no longer log onto both emails simultaneously. Gmail will realize that you are "cheating their system" and make you log out of one to log into the other. 

Many people do not see a problem with this. well when everything is tied to a certain Gmail account, such as Youtube, Blogger, Google Labs, Stumble, Facebook, Autofill...it makes it extremely painful to work on School email in one tab and do absolutely nothing else in the other tabs. My frustration meter was almost instantly pegged.

Needless to say of the possible fixes none of them are conducive to a productive work environment. There were many new Facebook Status posts about the lack of care the the developers at Google expressed for their loyal following.

Back to using a computer to do one thing at a time...Because Multi tasking is clearly for not anyone who has two or more Google accounts.