fuck this job.com

I've said before that I'm a technology parapro for my area's Board of Education. The bulk of the job involves swapping out monitors with inexplicably missing connector pins and generally plugging things in for people who can't do so for themselves. Armed with a paycheck somewhat unfit for even this less-than-gargantuan feat, I also (equally inexplicably) do web design for said institution.

Let it be known that I recieve in compensation... for both of these tasks together... roughly a third of what a web designer alone recieves. That monetary issue is completely and unequivocally not what this blog is about. It's about me casting off some of the crystallized acid building up in my brain and arranging it into text for you, my readers, to gaze upon in wonder of what has me so worked up all over again.

Sure, I'd like more money... but I make it a point not to complain. Why? Because I am in a unique position to wash away some of the horrors of the intangible bulletin boards whisking along the telephone lines, rebounding off of shiny satellite plates, and generally wafting about between wireless hotspots and the laptops and desktops of the internet-using populace.

I am, of course, referring to the abundance of piss-poor web design. I think of these awful sites as condemned buildings rarely haunted by sentient travellers... they are the slums of the vast internet and, like their real-world counterparts, it is rare that an unsuspecting traverser of the information superhighway doesn't find himself or herself gawking at such a ghastly structure at some point during his or her journey from page to page.

More ghastly, indeed, is the occurence of thought in one's head that someone, at some distant and unfathomable point in time, typed in the last of that dubious code, opened it in a browser now eroded by obscurity, stood back, and said... "Well, that looks pretty good. It's a keeper."

A school website has no business looking like an eleven-year-old girl's tribute site to Orlando Bloom which hasn't been updated in four years. Nor does it have any business bearing an abundance of glitchy scripts which, for example, make text dance around like coked-up hookers in olive-green dresses trying desperately to get a date to a high-school prom at midnight in the middle of June and loudly but incoherently declaring that one should be utterly remiss if one failed to "click here for lunch prices!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Bet you thought I'd run out of breath... I'm surprised that the internet hasn't.

A school website has no business being laden with swarms of animated images of footballs spinning, lunchboxes opening and closing, and little envelopes hurling themselves through the air by way of a rich and natural need to be deposited into little animated images of mailboxes. And these images... techically known as "gifs," all bear a pallid and blocky halo due to the fact that they were stolen away from their natural habitat... a tacky "free animated gifs" site which has assumed that they will be placed upon a white background... and placed without fail upon a black background. The halo, you see, is the result of the blending of colors around the outside of the image so that it will fade smoothly into the white page. This technique falls down in the insistance of every rank ameteur that a website should be blacker than the remains of a monk with a very important message to deliver. My apologies to those monks who merely wish to distribute their flyers.

A school website has no business distributing its asinine philosophies by way of a font embroidered in the vomitous elaborations which attain every possible goal of the webmaster that doesn't involve the ability to be comprehended by any human means. Nor does it have any business doing so in any shade of blue, green or red too darkly resembling the tar-drowned putrification that is the page's voidlike background.

But now I have a chance to clean up a percentage of a percentage of the problem. I can rest... completely broke but secure in the knowlege that my digital domain will look a little bit better in the wake of my stride as the county's aesthetic executioner. May no midi sleep peacefully tonight, and woe be to the java applets lurking around every corner trying to scroll their photo albums at the innocent web surfer. Weep for the four-megabyte jpeg image of some idiot grinning an idiotic grin at some idiot with a camera.

My delete key is ready for you. Prepare to meet your programmer.