So, after spending the majority of the morning on facebook whilst pretending to work, it’s then time for lunch (apologies for it being a two week lunch break by the way – I had some serious drinking to do).
I personally look forward to lunchtime with almost the same anticipation as hometime; a chance to finally get out the office. However, some people resign themselves to the total mundanity of their job by having lunch at their desks. Before writing this blog, I typed ‘office ettiquete’ into google and was asked if i meant 'office etiquette'. I did. Eventually I was presented with numerous articles, all offering different rules and regulations on how to conduct oneself in the work place. One tip that popped up on all of them was: if you planned on eating at your desk, keep it simple. Anything more extravagant than a cheese sandwich was roundly considered a bad idea, due to the distracting effect such food can have on your colleagues. This rule, however, is not only rejected by the people working in my office, but flouted to the point of absurdity. Everyday the people I work with tuck in to a medley of ridiculously flamboyant nosh; seafood paella, Goan fish curry, broccoli and stilton chowder served in an old running shoe. It has almost reached the level of competition for the two girls that sit opposite me; ‘I’ll see you’re tofu casserole and raise you some Korean fermented cabbage.’ It’s not that I’m one of those people whose stomach turns upon getting a whiff of this kind of pungent pabulum. It’s just distracting. And it makes you simultaneously hungry for sustenance yourself, and depressed that all you have to look forward to is a crummy old cheese sandwich...? Fuck it! Tomorrow I’m coming in with my fondue set.
Say you are, unlike myself, the sort of person that is prone to telling people what is on their mind. How would you go about telling the person sitting opposite you that perhaps their choice of a lunch time meal wasn’t particularly appropriate for the close proximity conditions of the work place? In the real world, you’d feel at ease in amicably spouting ‘Christ Tony! That stuff stinks! Take it outside will ya!’ But this sort of language doesn’t fly in the office environment. No, in the office it’s formality all the way. From the method of your actions to the clothes you wear, every element of office life is conducted with an air of unending officialdom. Everyone presents themselves appropriately. Everyone treats each other graciously and with respect. People open doors for others and apologise for their interruptions. It’s one of the last true bastions of etiquette left in the country today. And it’s bloody awful!
Idiots that read the Daily Mail are continuously exposed to endless articles about 'Broken Britain' and how what this country needs is a return to the 'traditional' values of constraint and propriety. But a world in which everyone acts like their in one big office may be a world in which verbal profanity would be down, but shotgun-toting mad men would definitely be up. It’s just not natural to treat other humans in this way. We are godless, marauding, killing, shagging, defecating mammals, and being forced to act like we’re in an Enid Blyton novel would create mass despondency and, ultimately, complete and utter population breakdown. Trust me, it’d be Mad Max 2 after a fortnight.
One thing, it seems, that is permissible within the office I work in, is the use of needlessly loud and irritating mobile ring tones. Let’s face it, your ring tone is only amusing to you; no one else cares, and everyone else doesn’t get it. It must be said, the majority of the office (including myself) put their phones on vibrate during work hours. However there are a couple of crazy cats that spurn these attempts at consideration and keep their phones turned up to eleven. They’re wacky, and they want you to know it.
Tubular bells guy: this chap works in the forever-busy legal department and consequently we are treated to the eery tune from The Exorcist at least five times a day. Needless to say, it never gets old.
Nokia salsa guy: some bloke that sits directly behind me has opted for the salsa tune that comes standard with all Nokia phones. Of the almost infinite number of sounds that he can program his phone to make, he has decided that this little ditty sums his character up perfectly. I, for one, have to agree. He is generic, dull and f*cking irritating.
Yoda text message guy: this absolute wanker jumped on the band wagon a couple of years ago (along with just about every other Nuts reader in the country) and downloaded the hilarious text message tone of Yoda saying ‘mmm, message from the dark side you have.’ This joke was funny for about 2 seconds (coincidentally, the same length of time as the tone itself). But this c*nt has kept this gag long past it’s sell buy date, seeming to believe that being post-modern about Star Wars demonstrates some sort of profound intellect. I mean it has only been a couple of decades since people have started doing it; maybe people haven’t cottoned on yet? Tosser!
There is a person in my office that laughs every time that Yoda text message thing goes off, and I really wish that he wouldn’t. He is the sort of bloke that laughs at just about any comment that skims, however slightly, the surface of humour. These people are great sometimes; when you’re feeling kind of down and want a moron that’ll giggle at everything you say, eventually proclaiming that you are 'one funny fucker', thus confirming what you already knew. But the problem with these people is that everyone thinks they’re a comedian around them, and consequently they perpetuate possibly the worst aspect of office life: the unfunny ‘funny guy’.
I’m certain every office has one (the two I’ve worked in so far have). They’re instantly recognisable by their daft grin, zany tie and ability to look like a stupid cock before even opening their mouth. They usually have a gang of cronies that swarm around their desk at periodic intervals in order to get a top up of comedy gold. Occasionally one of the pack will attempt to be ‘funny’ too, but will immediately be beaten down by the group’s leader. They're like hyenas in that way. Though they're not as funny as the ones from The Lion King.
Anyway, this is the guy that, when he gets an idea for a funny email, cc’s everyone in the department in on it so we can all relish his divine wit. You hear a courteous chuckle here, a half-hearted titter there. You yourself force out a single solitary ‘Ha’, just to be polite. Then inevitably 'Mr. Better Laugh So That People Will Like Me' pipes in with his speciality: ‘You’re hilarious mate. You’re wasted here. You should be on the stage!’ Yeah, you should be on the stage. Preferably you'd be sharing it with a guillotine, but definitely on the stage. ‘That bit where his head fell in the basket! Priceless!’ But it’s too late. This guy now thinks he’s the funniest thing since sliced bread and because of the aforementioned formalities of office etiquette he will continue to think this until he lands himself in hospital after trying out that one from chav-gags.com at his local Wetherspoons. ‘What’s the most confusing day of the year for a Chav?...Father’s Day!...I said Fa…’
So these are some of the fun obstacles that one has to deal with during the average afternoon at work. By four o’clock everyone seems to have given up even attempting to look like they’re doing any work (a bit like Friday) and you spend the final hour playing Tetris in the corner of your screen. Towards the end of the week, the unfunny ‘funny guy’ sends an email around saying that he’s going to go to the office local after work to ‘drink a hundred pints of beer’ (or something equally as wacky) and wants an audience. So you fob him off with another excuse. My last one was that I had just received an emergency text and had to head home immediately. It was half true; my housemate had just been promoted and was back in the living room with two bottles of gin.
That was a lot of fun. Or at least it was until the alarm went off the following morning.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
work quirks
Let us, to quote that bloke Lewis Caroll, begin at the beginning. The alarm goes off. You drag yourself out of your glowing cocoon of a bed and brave the freezing, gloomy world outside. You shower, pump yourself full of caffeine and head off to the tube, where you spend the entire journey crushed into an elongated metal coffin, packed to the rafters with other equally miserable human beings. Then you get to work and are met with the prospect of spending the proceeding eight hours of your life staring into the empty void of a computer screen like a 21st century Narcissus.
Now, maybe I’m way off on this one, but the last thing I want to do when I arrive at this carpeted prison is confirm the dire circumstances of my situation by greeting everyone in the place with a cheery address. Yet everyone feels the need to wish a ‘Good Morning’ to everyone else upon beginning their daily incarceration. It is a need almost based in compulsion, as you seem to run the risk of spending the remainder of the day totally devoid of all human contact if you fail to utter this initial greeting. Regardless of the fact that you’ve probably only spent a maximum of fifteen hours apart from your beloved colleagues, office etiquette dictates that you have to go through this same rigmarole each and every morning before you can re-establish communications with them. I’m not saying that the process of wishing people a ‘Good Morning’ every day is particularly taxing, but surely it’s come to something when people refuse to acknowledge your existence without it. I’ll give you an example.
The other day, I arrived at work in my usual fashion (i.e. pissed-off and hung-over) and plonked myself down at my desk. There are six people who work in my immediate area, but at ridiculous o’clock only the girl that sits diagonally opposite to me was present. A pleasant girl, we usually exchange some form of verbal exchange at the start of the day. However, this particular morning, she had her head down studying a text with what seemed to be a relative intensity. My mental process was as follows: she looks like she’s busy, plus I feel like my head’s been raped by Zinedine Zidane, ergo I’ll forego the morning pleasantries. I must have sat there for the better part of half an hour before I was startled from my delirious haze to discover that she was looking over at me, her eyebrows raised in expectation of an answer. ‘I’m sorry?’ I grumbled. ‘Good morning’ she said…Good. Fucking. Morning. Seriously? Is there really any need to say that after I’d been there for thirty minutes? For god’s sake woman, I sit less than 2 metres from you! Unless you have the depth perception of Gordon Brown, there’s no way you missed me being there all this time! But this, it seems, is one of the many ridiculously pointless things you have to do in an office.
So, then it’s off to make the first cup of what inevitably turns out to be an unhealthy amount of coffee. I happen to sit quite close to the kitchen area of my office and thus, determined to avoid the unbelievably awkward small-talk that occurs in such areas, I usually wait until the coffee making area is totally devoid of human activity before I make my move for the caffeine. Nevertheless sometimes, whether because I’m still drunk to the point where my perception isn’t functioning, or because of some sodding colleague that generates the noise levels of a tit mouse, I get stuck in the kitchen area with a fellow human being. And then it’s too late. You can’t turn around and walk out. They’ve seen you. You are trapped.
So you return the awkward smile and try to go about preparing your coffee without making a fuss. You’ve retrieved your favourite mug from the cupboard (the one with Garfield lying in a hammock. Brilliant.) and you’re deliberately spooning in the coffee granules at a snail’s pace because the other person is standing right in front of the kettle, and…'How’s it going?’ Damn! So close. You almost made it out of there with some level of decorum, but now you’re going to have to exit the kitchen doing that awkward crouching side-step walk, like a crab wearing a too many hats. The reason? Because there is no naturalistic way to end one of these kitchen conversations. More often than not it’s someone you don’t know particularly well, because the people you work with are sitting at their desks, waiting for you to bring them their coffee like some cotton field-owning taskmaster (discussed below). No, it’s usually some random guy from Accounts who’s been hanging around there all morning so he can tell everyone that walks in that he’s off to Cuba next week. The conversation always follows the same pattern: You reply with the usual ‘Fine thanks. Yourself?’ Then the person that instigated the conversation says their fine and then launches into the topic that they wanted to talk about in the first place; the whole reason for their simulated interest in your wellbeing.
Everyone does it. Every single person thinks about themselves more than anything else in the world. But no one wants to admit that they do. So they disguise it. More often than not, it doesn’t vary much from the usual set up of a seemingly innocuous question designed to be reciprocated in order that the designated topic comes up. We’ve all done it. We’ve got something seriously cool planned to do on Saturday so it’s ‘Got anything planned for the weekend?’ They tell you that they might just chill out, go to the pub with some mates etc. And all the while you’re bursting with anticipation. Simultaneously excited by the prospect and anxious that you might blow your prepared explanation. The one that you’ve designed to drip in casualness, like a denim dressing-gown. The one which you’ve been practicing in your head ever since you found out about Saturday. Sometimes the gap between their answer and the polite reciprocation is unbearably long. A chasm of shattered hopes. You begin to crumble in the shadow of this potential ennui. But then it happens: ‘What about you?’ Finally. ‘Oh, I’m just going sky diving with Daniel Craig’.
Anyway, back to the kitchen. ‘Cuba eh? Wow. Sounds awesome. Really? 32 degrees? Huh. No. No, I’ve never been. Always wanted to though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeeeaaaahhhh. Right. Well, have a good time. See you when you get back. We’ll still be here. Haw haw haw.’ Then it’s time for the crab walk; You don’t know if they’ve finished boring you with their crap chat. You’ve tried to tie the conversation up nicely with that little accessible gag. All you want to do is get the hell out of there with your coffee, but you can’t look like all you want to do is get the hell out of there with your coffee. So you do the crab walk. It starts off slow; a kind of half-turn shuffle, all the while grinning inanely, just to demonstrate how much you enjoyed your conversation. Eventually this transforms into a forced canter about as natural as sarin nerve gas, which you retain all the way back to your desk. Sometimes they haven’t finished telling you about Cuba, and you have to stop half way through your turn and look like you weren’t about to go. Now that’s awkward.
Another perceived rule regarding coffee production is never EVER make one without asking everyone else in the building whether they’d like one first. This one took me a fair old time to get a grip of. For the first few days at my current job, every time I came back to my desk with a fresh cup of coffee, I was welcomed with some decidedly frosty glares from my colleagues. The sort of look you might give someone if they’d just told you that they laughed their head off all the way through Shindler’s List. Disapprovingly, I suppose. I don’t actually have too much of a problem with this one. It’s simple common courtesy. However, there are some people that never offer to go to the kitchen. They tend to be in the more senior positions and consequently feel it beneath them to do something for you. They worked hard so they don’t have to make the coffee any more. Those days are behind them. I’m not sure I agree with this mentality, and personally deem it to be in the same league as drinking your way through everybody else’s round at the pub, before farting loudly and walking out the door.
Right, that’s lunch.
Now, maybe I’m way off on this one, but the last thing I want to do when I arrive at this carpeted prison is confirm the dire circumstances of my situation by greeting everyone in the place with a cheery address. Yet everyone feels the need to wish a ‘Good Morning’ to everyone else upon beginning their daily incarceration. It is a need almost based in compulsion, as you seem to run the risk of spending the remainder of the day totally devoid of all human contact if you fail to utter this initial greeting. Regardless of the fact that you’ve probably only spent a maximum of fifteen hours apart from your beloved colleagues, office etiquette dictates that you have to go through this same rigmarole each and every morning before you can re-establish communications with them. I’m not saying that the process of wishing people a ‘Good Morning’ every day is particularly taxing, but surely it’s come to something when people refuse to acknowledge your existence without it. I’ll give you an example.
The other day, I arrived at work in my usual fashion (i.e. pissed-off and hung-over) and plonked myself down at my desk. There are six people who work in my immediate area, but at ridiculous o’clock only the girl that sits diagonally opposite to me was present. A pleasant girl, we usually exchange some form of verbal exchange at the start of the day. However, this particular morning, she had her head down studying a text with what seemed to be a relative intensity. My mental process was as follows: she looks like she’s busy, plus I feel like my head’s been raped by Zinedine Zidane, ergo I’ll forego the morning pleasantries. I must have sat there for the better part of half an hour before I was startled from my delirious haze to discover that she was looking over at me, her eyebrows raised in expectation of an answer. ‘I’m sorry?’ I grumbled. ‘Good morning’ she said…Good. Fucking. Morning. Seriously? Is there really any need to say that after I’d been there for thirty minutes? For god’s sake woman, I sit less than 2 metres from you! Unless you have the depth perception of Gordon Brown, there’s no way you missed me being there all this time! But this, it seems, is one of the many ridiculously pointless things you have to do in an office.
So, then it’s off to make the first cup of what inevitably turns out to be an unhealthy amount of coffee. I happen to sit quite close to the kitchen area of my office and thus, determined to avoid the unbelievably awkward small-talk that occurs in such areas, I usually wait until the coffee making area is totally devoid of human activity before I make my move for the caffeine. Nevertheless sometimes, whether because I’m still drunk to the point where my perception isn’t functioning, or because of some sodding colleague that generates the noise levels of a tit mouse, I get stuck in the kitchen area with a fellow human being. And then it’s too late. You can’t turn around and walk out. They’ve seen you. You are trapped.
So you return the awkward smile and try to go about preparing your coffee without making a fuss. You’ve retrieved your favourite mug from the cupboard (the one with Garfield lying in a hammock. Brilliant.) and you’re deliberately spooning in the coffee granules at a snail’s pace because the other person is standing right in front of the kettle, and…'How’s it going?’ Damn! So close. You almost made it out of there with some level of decorum, but now you’re going to have to exit the kitchen doing that awkward crouching side-step walk, like a crab wearing a too many hats. The reason? Because there is no naturalistic way to end one of these kitchen conversations. More often than not it’s someone you don’t know particularly well, because the people you work with are sitting at their desks, waiting for you to bring them their coffee like some cotton field-owning taskmaster (discussed below). No, it’s usually some random guy from Accounts who’s been hanging around there all morning so he can tell everyone that walks in that he’s off to Cuba next week. The conversation always follows the same pattern: You reply with the usual ‘Fine thanks. Yourself?’ Then the person that instigated the conversation says their fine and then launches into the topic that they wanted to talk about in the first place; the whole reason for their simulated interest in your wellbeing.
Everyone does it. Every single person thinks about themselves more than anything else in the world. But no one wants to admit that they do. So they disguise it. More often than not, it doesn’t vary much from the usual set up of a seemingly innocuous question designed to be reciprocated in order that the designated topic comes up. We’ve all done it. We’ve got something seriously cool planned to do on Saturday so it’s ‘Got anything planned for the weekend?’ They tell you that they might just chill out, go to the pub with some mates etc. And all the while you’re bursting with anticipation. Simultaneously excited by the prospect and anxious that you might blow your prepared explanation. The one that you’ve designed to drip in casualness, like a denim dressing-gown. The one which you’ve been practicing in your head ever since you found out about Saturday. Sometimes the gap between their answer and the polite reciprocation is unbearably long. A chasm of shattered hopes. You begin to crumble in the shadow of this potential ennui. But then it happens: ‘What about you?’ Finally. ‘Oh, I’m just going sky diving with Daniel Craig’.
Anyway, back to the kitchen. ‘Cuba eh? Wow. Sounds awesome. Really? 32 degrees? Huh. No. No, I’ve never been. Always wanted to though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeeeaaaahhhh. Right. Well, have a good time. See you when you get back. We’ll still be here. Haw haw haw.’ Then it’s time for the crab walk; You don’t know if they’ve finished boring you with their crap chat. You’ve tried to tie the conversation up nicely with that little accessible gag. All you want to do is get the hell out of there with your coffee, but you can’t look like all you want to do is get the hell out of there with your coffee. So you do the crab walk. It starts off slow; a kind of half-turn shuffle, all the while grinning inanely, just to demonstrate how much you enjoyed your conversation. Eventually this transforms into a forced canter about as natural as sarin nerve gas, which you retain all the way back to your desk. Sometimes they haven’t finished telling you about Cuba, and you have to stop half way through your turn and look like you weren’t about to go. Now that’s awkward.
Another perceived rule regarding coffee production is never EVER make one without asking everyone else in the building whether they’d like one first. This one took me a fair old time to get a grip of. For the first few days at my current job, every time I came back to my desk with a fresh cup of coffee, I was welcomed with some decidedly frosty glares from my colleagues. The sort of look you might give someone if they’d just told you that they laughed their head off all the way through Shindler’s List. Disapprovingly, I suppose. I don’t actually have too much of a problem with this one. It’s simple common courtesy. However, there are some people that never offer to go to the kitchen. They tend to be in the more senior positions and consequently feel it beneath them to do something for you. They worked hard so they don’t have to make the coffee any more. Those days are behind them. I’m not sure I agree with this mentality, and personally deem it to be in the same league as drinking your way through everybody else’s round at the pub, before farting loudly and walking out the door.
Right, that’s lunch.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
twitter twatter
You know who are idiots? Those idiots that post comments on YouTube. What a bunch of idiots.
Every single video on the site comes equipped with nauseatingly moronic commentary, courtesy of the world’s spotty little twat-faced populace. The infuriatingly-opinionated imbeciles that reel off these generic comments, presumably in between broadband-speed internet porn binges, continuously feel the need to validate their own existences by informing us that the new Fleet Foxes video is ‘so post modern’, or that they love the bit when Stewie shoots Brian in the kneecaps. ‘“Where’s my money, man!” Ha ha ha!’
So they lol and ;-) their way through a couple of lines, hit the ‘Post Comment’ button, and immediately feel as if they’ve made an impact on the world. What a bunch of idiots.
I’ve been aware of this issue for numerous years now but, like most things in this world, I simply put it down to the majority of people in it being thick. However the other evening, whilst re-watching an episode of one of the funniest shows ever to have graced the BBC, Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, I came across this comment posted 3 weeks ago:
‘screenwipe is for those more "intelligent people" who see tv as wat it is and love listening to charlie vent their frustrations for them :) like me’
This thoughtful assertion was made by a person calling themselves 'oasisaquiesce'. Sign one.
Sign two; regardless, of whether this statement is accurate, and technically the bit about 'Screenwipe' is, what sort of cunt writes that?! Aside from the fact that he used the incredibly naff way of spelling perpetuated by proles more attached to their mobile phones than they are to reality, he actually felt the need to write that! He sat there on his computer and thought it’d be worth his while to hit the necessary keys in the necessary order to create that ‘sentence’! To tell the world that he, despite almost total evidence to the contrary, is intelligent! W@ a 2L! I h8 ppl lk dat!
Incidentally, whilst researching for this blog, I came across this website:
http://www.lingo2word.com/translatetxt.php?searcher1=word&tosearch1=Create+Cool+Messages+,+Just+Type+Your+Message+in+the+left+box
This is essentially a utility for those who are wondering how best to convey information to people who have the language skills of a 90 year-old Asperger sufferer (i.e. those that talk ‘street’). Simply type in what you would like to say to said retard and click da button and you are rewarded with the best way to put it to them in a text. So, 'Hello there. How are you?' becomes ‘Hi der. Sup?’, and ‘What do you think about the economic problems facing the West today?’ becomes ‘Wadya tnk bout d econmc probs facing d west 2day?’ Admittedly if you do communicate in this daft style, you can fit more into a text, but you do run the substantial risk of blowing it completely with a girl when you ask her whether she would ‘fanC a \_/ aftr wrk?’
But back to these gobshites on YouTube. Do they really think that people care about their bland opinions?
[Note: I should just state at this juncture that I am perfectly aware of the irony of someone who is venting his frustrations on the internet moaning about people that are ostensibly doing the very same thing. However, there’s a couple of differences; 1) I don’t care what people think about my opinions, and 2) I’m not writing about how hilarious a collage of Bush quotes that someone’s looped over the top of American Idiot is. Plus, technically I’m getting paid for my opinions, as I write this blog at work. I have far more important stuff to do in my spare time. Like go on YouTube.]
As already alluded to, the majority of these pointless comments are posted by square-eyed no-hopers with the consequential significance of a jam sandwich. They watch the video of some guy getting hit in the nuts. They laugh. And then they feel the need to relay their pleasure onto the next viewer. The simple reason they do this is because they feel like they matter.
Most reasonably discerning individuals are aware that we exist as a completely irrelevant collection of matter in an ever-expanding universe, which itself logically means that we are getting more irrelevant every second (a fact ironically proven by the comments posted on YouTube). But no, not these chuckleheads. They want you to know that they ‘saw this in hd. wow awesome quality!!!!!!!!!!’
This obsession with informing others about what we are thinking and doing has recently reached an absurd zenith with the sudden rise in popularity of the twitter website. Essentially a social networking site, twitter seems to cater to people who feel the status function on facebook is not nearly self-indulgent enough. Now with a simple click of a button, you can inform friends, family and anyone who happens to have an account, exactly what you’re doing as you do it. Oh yeah, it’s not like Facebook where you have to confirm fellow users’ access to your profile; any random sociopath can hunt you down and ‘follow' you (surely an uncomfortable term). One of my ‘followers’ for example is some nut job calling him or herself 'AngelaKarnes' from Nashville TN. Let’s face it, it’s a him.
Aside from the usual gobbledygook (a natural consequence of giving simpletons access to a keyboard), there are status updates that list literally the most mundane activities in day-to-day life. For instance, 'austinhg' felt it appropriate to let people know that he was ‘in the doctors office, finally getting my chest examined’. Really? Not the head? 'BigLizzie' was ‘waiting for her pie to cool’. Good to hear you’re throwing caution to the wind there, Liz. And someone calling themselves ‘Stechski’ at half past midnight on 18th February said that he was ‘Chillin at home’.
Now, this is such a boring thing to state that there is only one explanation for it; this man killed a person that evening and thought he’d utilise the wonders of the world wide web to provide himself with an alibi.
‘Me’lad, the records on twitter clearly state that my client was at his place of residence at the time of the murder. Therefore I move for mistrial.’
‘Agreed. Case dismissed.’
Stechski just beat the rap. 12.58pm on the web.
Etc.
And why do people feel the need to continuously detail every aspect of their lives? If you said ‘insecurity of the highest order’, then you’d be right. Well done.
Yes, I’m afraid even if you’re Stephen Fry or Jonathan Ross, you still crave attention on a minute-by-minute basis. Or should that be especially if you’re Stephen Fry or Jonathan Ross. Whether this attention is real (as with said celebrities) or imaginary (as with everybody else), it is this necessity to validate our own worth that causes people to involve themselves in this world of constant updates and meaningless prattle.
Or at least that’s how I see it. Is it a bad thing? Probably not. Does it annoy me? Yeah, why not.
Occasionally, when attempting to refresh the ‘Everyone’ streaming function on twitter, one is confronted by a blank page sporting a single message:
Twitter is over capacity.
Too many tweets!
Well, they nearly got it right.
Every single video on the site comes equipped with nauseatingly moronic commentary, courtesy of the world’s spotty little twat-faced populace. The infuriatingly-opinionated imbeciles that reel off these generic comments, presumably in between broadband-speed internet porn binges, continuously feel the need to validate their own existences by informing us that the new Fleet Foxes video is ‘so post modern’, or that they love the bit when Stewie shoots Brian in the kneecaps. ‘“Where’s my money, man!” Ha ha ha!’
So they lol and ;-) their way through a couple of lines, hit the ‘Post Comment’ button, and immediately feel as if they’ve made an impact on the world. What a bunch of idiots.
I’ve been aware of this issue for numerous years now but, like most things in this world, I simply put it down to the majority of people in it being thick. However the other evening, whilst re-watching an episode of one of the funniest shows ever to have graced the BBC, Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, I came across this comment posted 3 weeks ago:
‘screenwipe is for those more "intelligent people" who see tv as wat it is and love listening to charlie vent their frustrations for them :) like me’
This thoughtful assertion was made by a person calling themselves 'oasisaquiesce'. Sign one.
Sign two; regardless, of whether this statement is accurate, and technically the bit about 'Screenwipe' is, what sort of cunt writes that?! Aside from the fact that he used the incredibly naff way of spelling perpetuated by proles more attached to their mobile phones than they are to reality, he actually felt the need to write that! He sat there on his computer and thought it’d be worth his while to hit the necessary keys in the necessary order to create that ‘sentence’! To tell the world that he, despite almost total evidence to the contrary, is intelligent! W@ a 2L! I h8 ppl lk dat!
Incidentally, whilst researching for this blog, I came across this website:
http://www.lingo2word.com/translatetxt.php?searcher1=word&tosearch1=Create+Cool+Messages+,+Just+Type+Your+Message+in+the+left+box
This is essentially a utility for those who are wondering how best to convey information to people who have the language skills of a 90 year-old Asperger sufferer (i.e. those that talk ‘street’). Simply type in what you would like to say to said retard and click da button and you are rewarded with the best way to put it to them in a text. So, 'Hello there. How are you?' becomes ‘Hi der. Sup?’, and ‘What do you think about the economic problems facing the West today?’ becomes ‘Wadya tnk bout d econmc probs facing d west 2day?’ Admittedly if you do communicate in this daft style, you can fit more into a text, but you do run the substantial risk of blowing it completely with a girl when you ask her whether she would ‘fanC a \_/ aftr wrk?’
But back to these gobshites on YouTube. Do they really think that people care about their bland opinions?
[Note: I should just state at this juncture that I am perfectly aware of the irony of someone who is venting his frustrations on the internet moaning about people that are ostensibly doing the very same thing. However, there’s a couple of differences; 1) I don’t care what people think about my opinions, and 2) I’m not writing about how hilarious a collage of Bush quotes that someone’s looped over the top of American Idiot is. Plus, technically I’m getting paid for my opinions, as I write this blog at work. I have far more important stuff to do in my spare time. Like go on YouTube.]
As already alluded to, the majority of these pointless comments are posted by square-eyed no-hopers with the consequential significance of a jam sandwich. They watch the video of some guy getting hit in the nuts. They laugh. And then they feel the need to relay their pleasure onto the next viewer. The simple reason they do this is because they feel like they matter.
Most reasonably discerning individuals are aware that we exist as a completely irrelevant collection of matter in an ever-expanding universe, which itself logically means that we are getting more irrelevant every second (a fact ironically proven by the comments posted on YouTube). But no, not these chuckleheads. They want you to know that they ‘saw this in hd. wow awesome quality!!!!!!!!!!’
This obsession with informing others about what we are thinking and doing has recently reached an absurd zenith with the sudden rise in popularity of the twitter website. Essentially a social networking site, twitter seems to cater to people who feel the status function on facebook is not nearly self-indulgent enough. Now with a simple click of a button, you can inform friends, family and anyone who happens to have an account, exactly what you’re doing as you do it. Oh yeah, it’s not like Facebook where you have to confirm fellow users’ access to your profile; any random sociopath can hunt you down and ‘follow' you (surely an uncomfortable term). One of my ‘followers’ for example is some nut job calling him or herself 'AngelaKarnes' from Nashville TN. Let’s face it, it’s a him.
Aside from the usual gobbledygook (a natural consequence of giving simpletons access to a keyboard), there are status updates that list literally the most mundane activities in day-to-day life. For instance, 'austinhg' felt it appropriate to let people know that he was ‘in the doctors office, finally getting my chest examined’. Really? Not the head? 'BigLizzie' was ‘waiting for her pie to cool’. Good to hear you’re throwing caution to the wind there, Liz. And someone calling themselves ‘Stechski’ at half past midnight on 18th February said that he was ‘Chillin at home’.
Now, this is such a boring thing to state that there is only one explanation for it; this man killed a person that evening and thought he’d utilise the wonders of the world wide web to provide himself with an alibi.
‘Me’lad, the records on twitter clearly state that my client was at his place of residence at the time of the murder. Therefore I move for mistrial.’
‘Agreed. Case dismissed.’
Stechski just beat the rap. 12.58pm on the web.
Etc.
And why do people feel the need to continuously detail every aspect of their lives? If you said ‘insecurity of the highest order’, then you’d be right. Well done.
Yes, I’m afraid even if you’re Stephen Fry or Jonathan Ross, you still crave attention on a minute-by-minute basis. Or should that be especially if you’re Stephen Fry or Jonathan Ross. Whether this attention is real (as with said celebrities) or imaginary (as with everybody else), it is this necessity to validate our own worth that causes people to involve themselves in this world of constant updates and meaningless prattle.
Or at least that’s how I see it. Is it a bad thing? Probably not. Does it annoy me? Yeah, why not.
Occasionally, when attempting to refresh the ‘Everyone’ streaming function on twitter, one is confronted by a blank page sporting a single message:
Twitter is over capacity.
Too many tweets!
Well, they nearly got it right.
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