THE NOT SO GREAT ESCAPE

I was struggling to come up with anything new for you today, so instead I have taken the bones from a small incident that happened last week and expanded them into this little offering. I’m sure some parts of it will seem terribly familiar to some of you, but, maybe there is a bit more insight into the thinking process (or lack of it) behind those recent strange events. Either that, or this is all totally irrelevant and you can quite happily skip this one if you like...


I’ve been giving rather a lot of thought to escapes and endings recently, not least because, due to my own idiocy, I needed to escape for a couple of days to reassess my so-called “web-life” and my position in relationship to it, and how I personally chose to interact with the wibbly-wobbly-world. I wondered, quite seriously, whether I would be much happier if I were to eliminate my entire web presence, and disappear off into the modern equivalent of an electronic desert island. Is that even possible in this crazy web-driven world we all now inhabit? I do know people, real genuine people, who have nothing at all in the way of computer interaction with the rest of the world, and they seem fairly content with everything except the fact that people keep on trying to tell them that they need an email address.

It’s not as if I’m an all-encompassing omnipresent “Fry-like” presence myself. Heck, I wouldn’t even have a mobile phone if work hadn’t insisted, so it should be easy enough, I thought, to “switch off” for a couple of days and sort out just what it is that I want from my “other” electronic existence. How did I want it to work for me? Joining the FizzBoks and the Twits hadn’t exactly been my most self-esteem-building experiences, and they were both things I had kind of reluctantly approached and been rather sucked into against my better judgement. However, I was there now, and whatever presence I had seemed to sort of work most of the time, even if I’d never really taken to it with the kind of religious fervour that some seem to.

Anyway, with all this in mind, I set about closing down a few connections for a few days in order that I wouldn’t be bothered by the whole general mish-mash of the complicated interactions of so many people and things trying to scream out that they were here and grab hold of my limited attention. Being occasionally supremely digitally illiterate, I set about my task before I had really thought it through. It’s a strange thing really that you go through all the processes of setting up accounts and suchlike and are generally so pleased that you’ve managed to get the thing to work at all, that you forget how it was that you actually got it to work. Three years later (or whatever) when you finally replace your steam driven device with something newer and more 21st century, you go through the whole process again on a brand new operating system, and you’re there at four in the morning screaming at the bloody thing about how the old one used to work, so “why can’t you???”

Maybe that’s just me then…

I was halfway down my list of contacts (or, if you prefer “friends”), merrily “blocking” away until I remembered that there was a privacy setting that probably actually did what I needed it to, and “blocking” wasn't the way to go at all and had, quite possibly, dire consequences for all those tentative relationships that I was so brazenly switching off. So, if any of you reading this got caught in that particular fishing net, then you have my hugest apologies if you were or indeed still are feeling “snubbed”.

They don't come back you know... any marketing “expert” will tell you that. Then again… What on Earth do they know about anything?

So anyway, a few days have passed now and my brain has swung back from its latest adventures out there beyond the rim and “I have returned”, and I am still struggling to reset the privacy settings back to what they once were. It also turns out that, much like the drains, “unblocking” is a lot more difficult than “blocking”. This, until the very occasion when I came to use it, I did not know. I just thought that it was a bit like setting a preference and you could switch them “on” and “off”, but it seems to involve getting embroiled in a much more complicated situation than that and you are effectively required to beg humble forgiveness once the hammer has been allowed to fall.

I guess that must just be the price you pay for occasionally displaying signs above and beyond my normal level of stupidity. Mind you, if that’s the only penalty, I guess I got off rather lightly this time, although I suspect it’s not the sort of thing you get away with twice. For a while I managed to lose count and, knowing that I had inadvertently removed ten from my list of thirty (I know, I’m just so very popular… Who’d have thunk it?) before the penny dropped, I thought that I could now only think of nine to reapproach. I was convinced that someone had completely slipped from my memory, which, in terms of friendships and the like was not good. Really not good at all.

It turns out that, as well as being partially computer illiterate when it comes to procedures which are a more rare occurance, I sometimes can’t count either. I wrote down two lists of nine people, neither of which added up to ten and it took me fifteen minutes to spot that only eight of the names were on both lists which means, in the terms of statistical analysis, that both lists of nine included ten legitimate distinct and separate users. Sometimes nine plus nine does equal ten.

Of course it will not have escaped your notice, because you are very wise and intelligent people and, if you weren’t, well I’m about to tell you anyway, that the irony of all this was that, having decided to crawl back under my rock for a while, I then had to spend more time socially networking than I would normally have done sorting out the mess I made of trying to get away from it...

As to endings…