Cartoon insincerity

[jducoeur]

I am ruefully amused. I'm finally letting Yahoo update the current version of Messenger (its IM product). It's walking me through the wizard, and there along one side is this smiley face icon with big Mickey Mouse hands holding a clipboard, and the *most* shit-eatingly insincere grin on its face. Imagine a smiley face whose teeth take up 60% of the circle. Better yet, I'll just show it -- it's small:

And it's right above the fine print checkbox saying, "Make Yahoo my browser's home page".

If ever I need a graphical equivalent of the stereotypical slimy used car salesman, I think I've just found it...

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Ever see the 'talking paperclip' MS Assistant a few years back? It was likewise smarmy, including winking at you in a very disturbing way.

Still is

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Clippy is still out there—I read a couple of years back that they'd killed him off, but I still see him come up every time someone starts Office on a machine where they haven't turned him off. (This happens regularly here, because we have shared machines in the conference rooms. When someone starts up a PowerPoint presentation, Clippy shows up; rather than dig into the menus to turn him off for good, they just dismiss him so they can get on with their presentation.)

[jducoeur]

It's the joke of the computer industry -- almost universally agreed to be the single worst idea Microsoft has ever had. (Which is saying quite a bit.) The paperclip went beyond merely useless, to actively aggravating...