Gmail saved me from some mild embarrassment earlier tonight.  At first, I was pretty impressed by the sheer idiot-proof-ness of it…until I realized that without it, I would have looked like an idiot.  I guess that is how idiotproofing works…but it was more than a little disconcerting that I was the idiot beneficiary in this case.

First things first, I love Gmail and can’t stand working with e-mail in anything other than the thread view now.  I will admit that it was originally a little painful, but only because I fear change and I am, as I briefly intimated in the prior paragraph, an idiot of the highest order…or perhaps “lowest order” is the appropriate turn of phrase in this instance.  Zoho mail takes this to the next level by enabling the user to expand and collapse threads on the main Inbox page, which is the goods…and one of the reasons why there will probably be a future blog post entitled “How I Migrated From Gmail to Zoho”.

OK – back to the geeks at Google saving my bacon.  I was trying to accomplish something that should be very simple to do without looking like an idiot…sending an e-mail with an attachment.  Here is an except from the body of the e-mail.  Notice the part that I have underlined.

So, I finished typing the message, and being of questionable intelligence, I clicked the “Send” button without actually attaching the ZIP file I referenced in the e-mail.  Gmail told me, in a very unobtrusive and non-condescending way, that I may have been an idiot, or at least committed an act of questionable intelligence.  Here is what I saw next on my screen.

I clicked “Cancel”, attached the file as originally intended, and clicked “Send” once again.

This kind of simple solution to a simple problem is what makes the difference between products that people love and products that make people mad…kind of like how my being self-aware enough to know I am an idiot makes me somehow higher up the evolutionary curve than a baboon…although if the lyric genius Danny Alexander is to be believed, I might just be on pretty solid footing with my fellow humans as well.

“I know I’m stupid so I must be smarter than you…”   — D. Alexander