Popups and popunders

Here's a direct mail challenge: send mail to boys at summer camp every day for a week. Mailing pieces must be brief, if recipients not avid readers, unsentimental, preferably humorous. If you don't feel like going to the post office for a weigh in every day, must fit in #10 envelope and weigh less than 2 ounces. No candy allowed. Ah, and did I mention that you must begin mailing four days before the camper even boards the bus?

One year I thought I distinguished myself with a series of cartoon postcards depicting what said camper was doing every day at camp. Said camper informs me that he did not in fact appreciate these miniature works of art.

This year I took a shortcut and looked on the internet for camping jokes. Usually I search for things like "material handling systems" or "apply for DUNS number." These webmasters know that I am not there for fun. I need the information they provide. Their sites make no desperate bids for my attention (if they make any at all).

This search was a new experience for me. Try this yourself: go to Google and enter "camp jokes" in the window. The quantity of popups on the sites I found flabbergasted me.

Pity the poor maligned engineer who invented popups, probably in answer to a real problem. Some popups are blessings. I am grateful for a popup telling me "System going down in five minutes; please save your work".

It all changed, though, the day the first salesperson saw a popup and said, "Wow! I can use this device to put my message right under the user's nose! It won't go away until the user clicks on the little x! Hey, we can get the programmers to put lots of these on our website!"

"But-" the programmer sputtered. "Popups are for emergencies!"

"Yeah, and it'll be an emergency for you if we outsource your job to Bangalore."

And popunders do not even pretend to carry important messages. You just look down at your screen and realize that you suddenly have eleven open windows. No wonder your screen refreshes so slowly.

I am pleased to say that Google agrees with me about pop-ups. Apparently they find them as intrusive as I do. Which is why you will never find pop-ups on this site, other than the fact that Google hosts Blogspot, and I do not know how to program pop-ups. Yet.