I love you google... but wtf?

Dear Google,
.... no I'm not going to start my blog this way....


So I had to help my GF out tonight. She was working on a Powerpoint presentation and my help started out with trying to describe how a silicon chip was made. I had to explain just the part where they cut the wafer and transfer the dye to the lead wires. That was excruciating enough.

When she finally finished her Powerpoint, she needed to send it to her professor but the email attachment limit was 10 mb on hotmail. She couldn't send it, so I told her to get a Gmail account because the attachment limit was higher, I think. I'm still not sure...

I really don't mind waiting or helping her at all, actually my beef is with Google. I'm currently uploading this file and I expected to see some kind of progress bar displayed on the screen but all I get is this infuriating circle pie chart thing that keeps rotating without giving me any information of whether or not I'm close or far, or even uploading at all. I still have to check back every minute or so to see if it is complete.

Isn't there ANY way to let the user know if the upload is still in progress and just how far along they are? I haven't read any of Jeff Atwood's blog in a while so I went through 6 of them. SIX! 6 blogs later, and I'm still waiting for this upload to finish so I can send out a simply email with a link to this Powerpoint file. Is a small progress bar so hard to ask for? I'm still checking by the way.

I know this whole rant is really insignificant and something that probably never crossed the minds of the developers at Google but isn't this what we've come to expect from them? To think of the things that we would never think of? They have programs like sketchIt that is pretty much parallel to AutoCAD. Google. AutoCAD? I would have never thought they would make something like that... couldn't they have at least let me know how much longer my upload will take? But then again, I just felt like ranting.

She also ran into the same problem on hotmail but closed the window after a while because she thought the window or something crazy crashed...

By the way, I'm still checking that rotating pie chart of hell.