A Critical Reader

Google Reader doesn’t trust me.

I can feel its incredulity every time I rapidly scroll through a folder full of blog posts only to click the “Mark all as read” button at the top of the screen.

“Are you sure you want to mark 80 items from News as read?” it says.

It’s a seemingly innocuous screen–just making sure you don’t “virtually delete” something you didn’t intend to delete. But I can hear the undertones:

“You read those? Really? 80 items in 22.3 seconds? I don’t believe you. You can’t have read those so quickly. I can’t believe you’d lie to me like that.”

I return the reader’s criticism with a bit of my own.

“Well, if you’d given me any other option, I wouldn’t have lied to you. Why didn’t you give me the option to ‘Mark as I’m sticking my head in the sand today‘? Why didn’t you give me the option to ‘Ignore all posts’? You’re the one who makes me have to say that I’ve read something in order to make it disappear from my reader. It’s really your own fault. You made me do it.”

And I’m not going to read 80 stupid news articles just because you’re critical. Sorry, I just don’t really care that much what you think of me.

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