'The Website is Down' Back for More with Excel Hell

It’s finally here—the second episode of The Website is Down has been released, and we had a chance to get a sneak peek at the long-awaited continuation of the screencasting techie-comedy web series. The debut of “Excel Hell,” a full 9 months after the first episode, “Sales Guy vs Web Dude,” hit the internet and went wildly viral, may have been a long time in the making, but the wait was well worth it.

The new episode (see trailer above), from creator-star Josh Weinberg, is an 8 minute, 54 second epic look at the computer habits of Chip Morehead, the sales guy from the first episode. To accurately describe the episode is nearly impossible; this is one of those things where you have to watch it 3 or 4 times to accurately take in all the little jokes. A small sampling includes: Chip’s wanton clicking on popups that say “Install More Spyware!!”, his misunderstanding of Excel (using a PowerPoint file entitled “Excel.ppt” instead), the way he plays Minesweeper using his gut-feeling, or the fact that his background consists of a massive number of icons, all on top of a background picture of those icons spelling ‘Fuk U!’ and drawing out a penis (as per the first episode).

In addition to the new ep, there are a bunch of other easter eggs and fun toys on the site. The best one by far is the Sales Guy Simulator, where users can play around with a sample desktop, including moving icons around, writing in Notepad documents, and getting little audio and video extras when certain icons are clicked. The Unix command line is still around as well, where you can get insulted by the operating system, listen to the theme song or a real-life voicemail when TWID‘s website actually went down, and watch a video titled “Karateka” that I’ll let you discover and savor on your own. (Full episode below)

Weinberg has hit on a winning idea, and he’s done all the right things this time around. The episode brings us more of the brilliance that the first one did, but this time it’s packed to the brim with small jokes, some of which I didn’t even catch until the 4th time I watched the episode. Add to that all the little games and easter eggs, and Weinberg’s creation is sure to suck users in and keep them on the site for a lot longer than your average website. And, as we suggested last time, you can now buy some awesome t-shirts and show off your TWID pride.