Every day, I think, I get this thing from Urban Outfitters, a “notification.”
It pops up in the upper right-hand corner of my screen and I have to make it go away. I don’t know which email account it belongs to, or even if it belongs to an email account, I don’t know what I did to encourage it, but it is there. It’s just an ad, and it’s irritating. There are things I need to do, and want to do, but keeping abreast of the Urban Outfitters [sparkle emoji] Deal of the Day [sparkle emoji] is not anywhere on any list I ever made.
I have several Gmail accounts; a personal one, a professional one, and one I started simply as a way to not get a whole bunch of spam emails into my personal and professional mail accounts, such as for when I sign up for emails at a store site in exchange for a discount on my first order or something like that.
When I am participating in the Internet, I leave all the email tabs up because it’s irritating to log in and provide a password. It’s even, for me, annoying and micro-time-consuming to log in and then have to click-confirm a window where my password is saved inside an Apple Keychain or a Google Chrome passwords thing or however it works. I don’t want to be an expert on this stuff, I just want to use it and not have to remember things and not have to click on extra things, so I leave a pile of tabs open. I bought extra RAMs for my computer specifically for the purpose of having this luxury of leaving a kabillion tabs open.
I try to keep my computer arranged to reflect my own priorities, which seems natural and is also the opposite of the industry default. All the web sites and email things, before they allow me to do anything else, try to get my permission to Notify me, henceforth and forever, so that they can tell me that their thing is THE MOST IMPORTANT RIGHT NOW thing, which is some sort of Psych 101 lesson about cognitive dissonance or how to make a rat lose its mind.
Have you ever been in a work environment where you’re on someone else’s computer and they have their notifications enabled and you’re trying not to look at the thing that just popped up and got your attention? It’s up there and you try to be a good coworker and keep it from registering in your peripheral but you also wanna drag it off the screen so you won’t have to be distracted by it, but also I am not good at doing that effectively as opposed to inadvertently click-opening the damn message, the same way I click-open those stupid AdChoices things where you think you have a choice at having to look at an ad in the middle of a web page you are reading.
Invariably you get sucked into a critique of the ad, why was the ad displeasing, was the ad offensive, was the ad for stuff which does not interest you, etc. WHY? BECAUSE YOU STUCK IT RIGHT THERE WHERE I AM READING, it’s not like ads on the side, I never go out of my way to hide those, and I even look at those because they aren’t being annoying. Ads can be helpful information!
I tried to close an ad box on the New York Times site and I got pulled into a shopping experience.
HYPOCRISY DISCLOSURE: I work for a web site that does not have ads, and have no idea if the web site I represent does “sign-up” and “get emails from us” things in a non-irritating fashion for anyone who signs up for emails or executes a log in to the site.
Then there are web sites that want your info, and I am going to call some of these web sites DUMB, because nine times out of 10 I am getting a question from the site while I am at the exact spot on one of their web pages where you ask THEM what THEIR location is. I am the user and I will ask the questions! Stop making me click on things! No!
I will not allow you to access my location! I am on your web page looking for YOUR location, a location that may not be logically close to my house! Maybe I won’t be at my location when I want to go to Home Depot, maybe I will be at an undisclosed location! What’s it to you where my location is at! You tell me yours! Obey! It’s why you have a “Store Finder” page!
You know who has a SMART web site, as compared to a Home Depot-type site? Blimpie! They make submarine sandwiches, even though they have a blimp aerial motif.
They have a good Internet experience, especially when you want to find your nearest Blimpie base, you go to their site, they ask you if you want to join their club, and you don’t have to, but you don’t even have to be precise, you just click on the rest of the page and the box goes away, and you’re at full Blimpie.
There is a convenient box for “WHERE’S MY BLIMPIE®?” and you punch in some info, and you can find a Blimpie.
It’s how things work, web sites want your email address, or they want you to be a member of their site for all sorts of reasons, sometimes just so their web site will stop asking you if you want to do those things. Advertising is a legitimate thing and supports web sites. Sometimes these things are done correctly and non-irritatingly. Thanks, Blimpie!
UPDATE: I finally figured out how to block that Urban Outfitters Deal of the Day notification. The setting is in Google Chrome, chrome://settings/content/notifications. I searched for “urban,” and there it was, sitting there being “allowed.” Not any more!
