Pop-ups

Recently I was in a pop-up store in Belgium. A pop-up store is a temporary store, which offers one-time opportunities. Often, these opportunities are a possibility to buy something at a very low price. More often it is an opportunity to buy something at normal price while you think it is cheap. Sometimes it is an opportunity to eat something unique or to have another special experience.

It is 9 AM, time to start work. While I’m working on a software project, Viber displays a small but annoying pop-up window on my screen. It says it is updating. The pop-up is exactly in the middle of the screen, preventing me from reading the programming code I’m working on.

So, I decide to have a quick look at a website on my other screen while Viber takes a minute or so to update itself. Meanwhile, my partner sends me a link to a website, which Skype displays in a little pop-up window in the bottom-right of my screen. When I see this, I somehow remember I wanted to reduce the audio output level of my computer, but when I move the mouse to Window’s system tray, a pop-up tells me that some Asus bloat ware has been updated and keeps me from clicking on the sound icon.

Three minutes later, I change the sound level, uninstall the Acer bloatware permanently, click on the link in Skype to start Firefox, and start Viber. Unfortunately, this takes me about 10 minutes, including a quick check for additional bloatware, which fortunately doesn’t seem to exist on my computer for now.

At 9:15 I start Viber, which opens with a pop-up. Now we have oversized emoticons! Send gifs! Wtf –who cares about bouncing pies and frames of Mr. Bean?! The Viber screen was displayed on my secondary screen at a large size. The pop-up covering the Viber window deactivated that Viber window and immobilized it. Hence I was forced to move the window containing this text to my smaller primary window. Close, close, close! I pressed the close button and was surprised by a bunch of gifs for which I have no need. Clicking somewhere suddenly removed the gifs.

Good that we have got a little zen-garden near the river side.

So, when I started Firefox, I noticed that a script didn’t work correctly. Perhaps it got disabled due to security issues, I thought. So, I decide to update Firefox to the latest version, after which I restarted the browser again. The result was a huge pop-up courtesy of the annoying SendGrid. Why?! Anyway, I’m 15 minutes later into my day and still haven’t done anything productive.

Alright, perhaps it is time to relax with an article from the Daily Telegraph. No, not that one about a page 3 girl who got tempted to travel to the Near East. I’d rather read the article about Mother Theresa… Pop-up! Pay now or… Wait a sec, can’t I just block that pop-up with AdBlock? Yes, I can. What about that annoying cookie bar? Yep, that too. Again, five minutes of my time.

Oops! Now I remember I should have paid an important invoice before doing all those other things. Let me do this quickly. I log in on my bank’s website and after half a minute I am still waiting for the website to load. Wait a sec… what is that little pop-up on top of the website? Can’t load Flash?! On a bank’s website?! Yes, it is unbelievable, but my bank uses Flash.

I need to update Flash. Because I don’t like online updates, I go to Adobe’s website and download the Flash installer for admins. I make sure not to install McAfee (no pop-up this time, but a very tiny easy-to-miss checkbox that is set to ‘on’ by default) and almost 10 minutes later I am good to go. Invoice paid.

Anyway, I don’t know if it was because of the updates, but the script worked again. It is almost 10 AM. Time to take a break, away from all the unique opportunities on the ‘net. They took almost an hour of my day. I don’t need pop-ups.