Different strokes for different folks

Steven and I are in the middle of buying a house right now. It's pretty stressful for Steven. Not so much for me. I mean, it is a little bit for me, but not at all to the same degree. He is literally losing sleep over the indecision of it all. I have not gotten very worked up one way or the other. I mean, it is something I want and it would be nice to have, but if this one falls through, another will come around. I found this place acceptable in many way and could envision myself getting attached in the future, but I haven't formed any particular attachment yet. In fact, I can't even remember what some of the rooms looked like. I have a pretty good sense of the common areas since those were the most important to me, but I don't even remember the bedrooms or bathrooms that well. I do remember the outside being particularly nice as well. But whatever. There are other places. I felt good about a couple others we saw before as well. I'll feel like another house is acceptable at some point in the future if this one doesn't end up going through. Steven found the house hunt to be pretty interesting, and now is finding it to be pretty stressful, but I have never found it either interesting or stressful (maybe a little of each, but not much). Looking at houses for me was simply a matter of assessing the features and seeing if the correct boxes were checked. When they were not, I moved on. When they were, we investigated the possibility of making an offer. The whole thing has been very businesslike and unemotional for me. I'll get emotional when I have it probably. Until then, it's just a structure.

But my house buying sentiments were not why I felt the need to blog today. Actually, it's both my reaction to houses and my reaction to Firefox 3.5. Upon upgrading to Firefox 3.5 and inadvertently activating the tear away tab feature when trying to move the position of my tabs, I became absurdly emotional. Why would anyone want such a horrible, useless, inconvenient feature? Firefox 3.5 can rot in hell! The mere fact that they included this awkward and counterproductive feature disgusts me. Did they not run focus groups? Did they not think to use simple common sense? Were they so enamored with the idea of some crappy newfangled feature that they forgot about making the browsing experience enjoyable? And at least three times as disgusting as that is the fact that it requires an add-on to disable the pointless waste of life that is tear away tabs. Did they really think that this feature was so indispensable that they couldn't include a simple way to disable it? Do they hate diversity and free choice? It is simply outrageous that they would give us this flawed product in place of our previously useful one. It's like taking away a child's perfectly serviceable bike and replacing it with one with two flat tires and then acting like it's a new feature that will make the bike riding experience more pleasurable. Oh sure, you can fix the "feature" eventually, but it's a big pain in the ass until then, and the audacity of their assumption that this feature would be unanimously well received is an affront beyond words.

I'll admit I'm hamming up my reaction a little bit, but far less than you might think. I did use the word disgusting multiple times and did feel both enraged and disgusted by this ridiculous feature. The add on to remove it is also extremely user unfriendly, and the sheer fact that I had to jump through that hoop to begin with made me rail angrily at the computer for the better part of five minutes.

Steven was flabbergasted by my reaction. He was shocked that something he considered so trivial (literally a five minute fix) had gotten me so worked up. I was more upset by the idea of it than anything else. Ugh. Disgusting that their judgement could be so poor. But I found it very interesting to contrast my level-headedness with regards to the largest purchase of my life and my irrational rage at some day to day minutia. I guess we all have our buttons and for some of us, the buttons aren't screwed on quite right. Like when someone switches your keyboard to dvorak so that all the letters printed on the keys are wrong. I just think it's good that Steven and I tend to match up in such a way that one of us is always at least a little level headed.