Thank you, MSN, for taking away My MSN

Thank you, MSN, for redesigning your website to cater to touchpad users. I applaud the demise of the old My MSN and its individuality and welcome my new role as a happy little clone in your Brand New MSN touchpad-friendly world.

Thank you, MSN, for your insistence on catering to an inferior interface like the touchpad, so that now instead of having dozens of links easily visible and accessible on one page, each a headline link made up of one or two compact lines of type, giving me a myriad of choices easily with a mouse and cursor, I now only have to worry about half a dozen or so clunky boxes taking up the entire screen so your beloved touchpad users can navigate the web using their precious chubby little fingers while smiling and drooling gleefully at all the pretty little thumbnail pics they get to point at and touch and even, if the mood strikes them, drool on.

Thank you, MSN, for getting rid of all that pesky customizable content, like the sports scores to my favorite teams, four-day weather forecasts, Fark and the LA Times feeds, and that rollover feature that would tell me more about the story in a small popup window. I’d much rather slog through your generic content which means nothing to me and generously donate my worthless time and help you, a multi-billion-dollar corporation, generate even more revenue through clickbaiting.

Thank you, MSN, for taking up the top inch or so of my browser window with that black menu bar that won’t go away. Just because that MSN pull down menu has the same choices as the horizontal menu bar not even an inch below it doesn’t mean the thing is entirely worthless. It’s also got a handy Bing Search bar that does the same thing as the two search bars that my browser has RIGHT DIRECTLY ABOVE IT.

Oh, and the best part is that is says “Welcome, David”, which will come in handy when I forget my name after banging my head on my desk while using your new and improved MSN. And let’s not forget the little cog, which contains the option to “customize” the page or to leave “feedback”, both of which I’ve thoroughly tried, and is the main reason I can be sure I’ll need that “Welcome, David” reminder after banging my head on my desk.

Thank you, MSN, for making it so hard to find the sports scores of my own teams. Rather than have them available at a glance, I’d much rather have to click several links to find them, since I know you guys need all that clickbait money, and my time, as I’ve said, is so utterly worthless. Plus, I so appreciate the opportunity to broaden my horizons and see the news about teams clear on the other side of the country that I don’t give a rat’s fart about. It’s refreshing, in a banging-my-head-on-my-desk sort of way.

Thank you, MSN, for taking away the four-day weather forecast that I had at the top of my page away from me. Who needs to know whether the weather will be hot or rainy within the next few days? It’s simpler and much more helpful to have only the current temperature. I’m grateful you spared me the walk out the back door to the thermometer on the patio. What a chore that was. And it was time that could otherwise be spent banging my head on my desk.

Thank you, MSN, for that revolving big picture of the eight or so stories that you, in your infinite wisdom, have decided I must know about so urgently that it is a moral imperative that this feature take up two thirds of the browser window and not in any way be a removable option like all the other categories. I especially like that it takes up the whole depth of the browser window, because now I have the wonderful opportunity of having to scroll down to see other content. And, because I have a scroll wheel on my mouse, I can scroll AND bang my head on my desk at the same time!

In fact, scrolling down seems to be a major feature of the new TouchpadMSN, fully as much as head-on-desk-banging. Instead of having over 80 links on three screens worth of scrolling on the old, yucky MyMSN, I can now experience the joy of scrolling through 6 pages with fully half as many links! Twice the scrolling with half the content! I had to count it twice just to be certain of just how truly blessed I now am with TouchpadMSN. The careful counting process went something like this: scroll down, count, *thunk*, scroll down, count, *thunk*, scroll down, count, *thunk*.

This all makes me almost as happy as that wonderful big block of ads that take up the other one third of the opening TouchpadMSN screen, a feature so gosh-darned wonderful it fully explains why this top portion of your new page isn’t removable. On second thought, that big block of ads makes me happier than anything else about your new site:  I’m happy I have Firefox with AdBlocker Plus. That grey, blank space where your ads should be just brings a smile to my face. I gotta love ya for  it. Three bangs of my head on my desk, just for you.

Thank you, MSN for that link bar at the top of the page right below the black bar. While I actually use Outlook, it’s also so very nice to have links to online versions of Office products, online versions that I will never use because I already own MS Office and have for many years.  

However, that One Note thingy should come in handy if I should ever want to spend five minutes trying to figure out how to jot something down that would take 5 seconds with pen and paper. And after spending time crafting my One Note, I can follow the next link and store it on my One Drive, because those pesky flash drives and the backup hard drive I have for storing hundreds of gigabytes of data are just so darned difficult to figure out, and this “Cloud Storage” thing is so popular that it’s been in the news for some reason lately.

And, you know, now that I think about it, the Maps link should come in handy just about every day when I get lost going to work at the same place I’ve gone every workday for the last several years. I’ll just have to remember to get lost. I’m sure anyone reading this has been wishing I’d get lost for quite some time now.

To top it all off, let’s not forget those links to the holy triumvirate of websites: Facebook, Twitter and Skype. With those three companies controlling and inserting themselves into every waking moment of my life, my life would finally be complete.

Wait … I’ve just followed the Music link to X-Box Music site and I’ve just found out that I can listen to songs by someone named Jeezy and someone else named Wiz Khalifa. I was wrong before. NOW my life is finally complete.

*thunk*

*thunk*

*thunk*