When work ruins fun

No, this is not going to be a post about working too much and not having time to have fun. This is about how working on something sometimes can change your perception of things around you and highlight problems, reducing the ability for me to enjoy reality.

Here is today's example: I was looking at MyThings to understand what they were really trying to provide you as incentives to cataloging everything you own and purchase in their systems. So I decided to list the first thing that I saw in front of me: my printer, an HP Photosmart C6180 All-in-One. So I started typing "Hp Photosmart C6180" and using the great auto-complete I've received the following suggestions:

hp photosmart c6180 hewlett-packard
hp photosmart c6180 all-in-one

What is the difference? Uhm... So I picked up the first one. And that's when I had an even nicer "surprise". They give me a list of products to choose that match "hp photosmart c6180 hewlett-packard":

1) Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart C6180 All-in-One
2) Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart C6180 All-in-One
3) Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart C6180 All-in-One
...

Two pages of it (about 18 options). All with the same title, the same specs, and two different images. All in the category "Other Electronics", which is a great category name. Finally, on the left there is a summary of how many per category were found and it shows:

Other Electronics (17)

And nothing else. So what is the categorization of the 18th product? No clue... they all look the same, so it's hard to figure out what doesn't show on their category count.

Most people wouldn't be bothered by those kinds of things. However, because improving an online retail catalog is my job, it killed my whole experience with the website and I decided to stop playing around with it, write this blog post and go to bed. I'm sure there are some great ideas on the website, and hopefully one day I will get back to it, but right now it's just too sad to see something like this.

Anyway, it's Wednesday now... Less than three days from now I'll be on an airplane heading home to Brazil. I don't know why, I'm actually a little nervous with this trip. Probably because I haven't planned much this time. It's going to be short with a lot of wedding-related events, so I didn't want to be just running around while I'm there. Oh, well... Let's see what happens.