YouTube's Gray Bar of Fury

This post is dedicated to Tyler, who has gotten me back on T.I.S.I. after a somewhat unnecessarily prolonged absence (life hasn't been interesting enough to write about, I'm sorry to say) . Hello again, dear nonexistent readership; I am here to "write a post about", to quote Tyler, "how ridiculously stupidly pointless it is."

He and I got into a discussion about that little gray bar--yes, you know the one--a few weeks ago while he was catching up on his reading of T.I.S.I. On a separate tab of his internet browser, he was logged into YouTube, and attempting to play a video featuring the OneRepublic song "Good Life". (Yay, OneRepublic!)

I wasn't with Tyler, but I could imagine how he must have looked as he sat before his computer screen on that night. I imagined it was roughly similar to the way he looked on a different night, many months ago, when he was playing Angry Birds and telling my sister Abby about it via text message until almost midnight. He wasn't happy. And it's pretty funny to imagine Tyler looking decidedly not happy, because whenever I'm near him in person his face is nearly expressionless, his voice always level. But if there are two things in the world that can constitute Tyler an unhappy camper, it's Angry Birds (thanks, Antman!) and YouTube. I know this because the text messages I received from Tyler the night he was listening--or being prevented from listening--to "Good Life" became increasingly short and ill-tempered as the minutes wore on. Finally he told me I should write this post, which brings us here. As always, it was a long journey, and I apologize.

Never subject yourself to this kind of misery.

In short, the Gray Bar is ridiculously stupidly pointless. One may think there is a point to it--that of telling the viewer how far their Flash player has progressed in buffering their video. Why, then, does it deceive innocent web-goers like Tyler by jumping ahead to the end of the black bar every time the "reload" button is clicked? You might have experienced this yourself on occasion, or else you might imagine how he felt. The red bar caught up with the gray one. The timer icon appeared in the middle of the player to tell him it was going to be a moment before the video began streaming again. Enough moments passed by to convince him this expectation was a lost cause, so he clicked "reload". And instantly the gray bar sped up to the end of the timeline, as if spinning around to stick its tongue out at him and sing a boastful tune before disappearing into the oblivion of never-to-be-loaded web pages. And again and again this happened, Tyler vowing each time that he would not be tricked again but would exercise patience. Yet each time he fell for it. I've done it too; I think we all have.

Let's all make a pact not to let this happen. Don't let that Gray Bar win! This age of internet video streaming must not instill such impatience into us that we click "reload" even though we know it won't do any good. Do not be deceived!

And again I must apologize, to Tyler, because... that's all I've got.

Thanks for reading (and not clicking),

Brooklyn