What I hate worst about Windows

Keeping Monday "lite," let's have a little rant, shall we?

So you start an application. But you know it'll take a minute or two to be ready to go. So, you have three options:

1. You could stare at your monitor, unmoving, zombielike, perhaps drooling just a tad.
2. You could go do something — get coffee, go fishing, raise a family.
3. You could start working in a window that's already open. Like that document you're writing in Word. Or that email to which you're replying. Or that post you're composing for your moderate (or high) traffic blog.

Normally I opt for #3. I'm an Ephesians 5:16 guy... or I try to be.

I reserve #1 for watching TV, and #2 for when I'm doing those activities — which I don't do instead of doing something else.

And, perhaps thanks to my Mom, I'm a pretty fast typist. If I'm on a riff, the words pretty well fly out. And, though self-taught, I'm basically a touch-typist. That means I don't always have to be watching the screen.

Ah, but Windows. Windows knows better than I do which window I should be working in.

So, though I might have started that application 10, 40, 75 seconds ago, and though I might be in the middle of a sentence... for no apparent reason, by sheer sovereign gracelessness, Windows plucks me out of the window I'm working in, and smacks me down in the window it thinks I should be in.

Now, I may not know this for a half-dozen words. Or I may hit "Enter" or the space-bar, to separate words or start a new paragraph (chiastically speaking) — but that isn't how the new window interprets those moves. It sees a spacebar as a selection; it sees an Enter as "OK," or "Cancel," or "Delete all hard-disk files."

And because I'm really typing fast, I don't even see it happen until it's too late.

Argh.

So I want to tell the programmer-dudes, "Look, dude — I'm in the window I want to be in! If I wanted to be in that window, I'd switch to that window! I don't expect apps to pop up with the speed of light, so I'm doing something in the meanwhile. So please, blink on the taskbar, give a discreet little 'boop' — but don't yank me out of my window and into your window, okay?"

There.