Dear Cisco VPN Client,

You and I have a rocky relationship at the best of times. Much of this stems from a fundamental inconvenience of VPNs in general — all those months you used to stop my music streaming to my XBox wasn’t really you, that blame sits with my employer. But, well, sometimes it feels better to shoot the messenger.

If I sound a little unreasonable, this is because I hold you in contempt.

Today’s UI fuck-you goes to you, Cisco’s abysmal VPN Client. Your failure to match the user experience of the Mac, having a ridiculously shit application icon that uglies up my Dock is all very irritating, but apparently since Leopard came along, you’ve found new ways to make the experience even shitter.

Disabling the ‘Back to my Mac’ feature whilst connected to the VPN is not entirely unreasonable: I mean, the whole point is to isolate me onto the corporate network. Annoying, very much so, but that’s how it works, so, whatever. What annoys me is the bullshit way you enforce this. You could be arsed to ship a utility to disable Back to My Mac automatically (that’s what happens when you click ‘Disable’). So, how hard would it be to provide the reverse to put my machine back the way it was when I disconnect?

You need to screw with my system settings? Put it back when you’re done.

We are not cool.

B