Symphony

Who said that the corporate world was soulless? Bullshit! The gods of the big business are also almost human. They laugh, they cry, they pooh (money and gold, of course) and they even text! So one day they scratched their collective heads with receding and pointy hair and decided, that what their minions really need was to do some corporate texting. Texting is in vogue. Texting is woke. Texting is cool and improves communications, when done under strict supervision, of course. And thus was born Symphony.

Some of my readers here must have cringed, as if biting into a very sour apple. You see, Symphony is not exactly Telegram, WhatsApp or even fucking Facebook. In fact, you can’t write “fucking” in Symphony, but more on that later. Instead, it’s a corporate bastard of some theoretical ideas that “messaging is profitable” and “everything must be HTML5”. Yes, it is written in (again) fucking HTML and JavaScript.

The first sign that you are in for a world of pain is rather subtle. To use it you need to start it. Sounds simple enough? Not so fast, my impatient friend! Try locating Symphony by searching for it in your startup menu. Nada? *evil laughter* Go fuck yourself, you corporate slave! No soup, ehh, messaging for you. Learn to scroll, before you can write! Yes, the developers of this monstrosity can’t even add an icon to the startup menu properly.

When you manage to locate it somewhere on the bottom of your list of applications, it immediately hogs up most of your memory. Just for the fun of it. Of course, it is doing lots and lots of important stuff, like sending stupid notifications, so 20Gb is the bare minimum it can survive with.

The interface must have been written by programmers from the most severe end of the autism spectrum. Or just plainly incompetent. While most software developers are somewhat detached from the reality, or, in plain English, don’t give a flying fuck about the end user, this doesn’t mean that software products must be left to their questionable design instincts. There are UI/UX experts, project managers and other more or less responsible people, who try to inject some common sense into what those lunatics with keyboards create between bites of pizza and slurps of cola. But they don’t work for Symphony, I assure you.

The interface is ugly and non-intuitive. You can’t find shit, and if you are not careful, you will end up triggering one of the multiple bugs and cause the application to hang. It’s extremely hard to customize even in some basic ways. For example, there is no way one can switch off notifications for a particular group. They keep flashing, like your Christmas tree. Symphony does provide some emojis, because the corporate gods heard about them, but the selection is very weird. There is no heart icon, for example, but there is one for love hotel. Well, go figure. And their so tiny, that it is very hard to actually figure out what they are supposed to be.

Speaking of emojis, my favourite one at the moment is that of duck. The prudish corporate arseholes don’t allow dirty words in the chats, so duck is a wonderful placeholder for the good old friend FUCK. Duck duck duck.

So here we are, with a useless shitty software for corporate messaging, which eats up all of the resources, crashes, won’t let you express your feelings and doesn’t even have an emoji for dick! No wonder everyone keeps using their personal messengers for work related texting. And no wonder corporate secrets keep being stolen via them!