SUDDENLY “POPULAR” IN GERMANY

It’s a funny old thing here in Lesser Blogfordshire that we get access to statistics about our humble offerings that do make you question whether the effort put in is inversely proportional to the interest in it. The posts I’m most pleased with are seldom the most read and the ones that I feel a bit underwhelmed by are the ones that seem to be the ones that get the most response.

With one notable recent exception, the most times any page has been looked at is twenty seven. Now, for me that’s something of a result, because it’s twenty six more people than usually listen to anything I may have to say.

There are only eight people in the world who claim to “follow” these meanderings through the woollier corners of my mind, so none of the pages are ever going to set the world alight. There might have been potentially a lot more once upon a time, but I think an early offering on a morose morning happened to coincide with one or two people’s first dabbling and made them realise what a sorry, sad individual I was and they ran away, vowing never to return.

Suddenly, however, one recent post has become a small hit amongst the population of Germany, which confused me for a time as it was the first of my rather acidic observations of my recent experiences with the NHS, and it rather surprised me that such an interest would be shown in that subject over there. I mean, I know that the whole European Union thing tends to lead to a great deal of mutual interest in how the inner workings of our sister nations might work, but I really didn’t expect that a tiny event in the life of one elderly lady on a bitter Sunday morning would become the most viewed of my humble musings by some considerable margin.

Then I twigged.

Somewhere in the depths of that text lay the answer – my unfortunate acronym for mum’s “GentleMan Friend” (which I won’t repeat here in case you think I’m fishing for more hits) has another more political and financial meaning in Germany and all of those viewers were seeking out - through the simple process of a quick Googling - a bit more information about that, and no-one at all was actually reading the drivvle that I was pouring out, they were simply clicking, finding something irrelevant, and moving on.

There was still nothing to keep them here with me in Lesser Blogfordshire.

Still, at least some of the “Erudite Eight” are still with me, although we genuinely do seem to have peaked at eight, never to become the “Notable Nine” or the “Terrific Ten” it would seem.

I do sometimes reflect upon my life and wonder why it is that I struggle to be a “person of interest” (if that doesn’t have too many other connotations) to those I have known. I meander around the peripherals of FizzBok and I notice so many whose friendships number in the hundreds and wonder what it is that I do wrong… I signed up about six months ago and very quickly climbed to the astonishing figure of thirty two and then… stalled.

That’s it.

Thirty two people I have known in my entire life are interested enough to pay the slightest bit of attention to my existence. Thirty two! Out of 500 Million people who are FizzBokers, surely in terms of simple statistics I know more of them than that…? Was I truly that awful or unmemorable? Is it just because I was always so ridiculously dull? Actually, rather astoundingly, the number has dropped over Christmas. One of my precious chums has chosen to drop out of the world of FizzBok and now I am down to an annoyingly odd number, which is (you’ll have already worked this out for yourselves) thirty one.

Lucky I don’t dwell on these things… (I don’t know the symbol for “sarcastic”, but if I did, maybe this would be a good place to put it).

Still, the interweb’s a funny old place. One little misplaced acronym and you’re suddenly slightly popular in a distant country, and acronyms are such tricky things, especially with so many new ones coming into use through the use of TXT SPK. Sometimes I struggle to keep up. I’m so very old that LOL still makes me think of “Loads Of Love” rather than “Laugh Out Loud” which has meant that I have to “doublethink” a lot of the things that I read. Sometimes I do wonder if the people writing some of these things realise how often they are being misinterpreted. For example, I very quickly realised I couldn’t use the two letter acronym for “Gentleman Friend” simply because it caused a potential gender confusion that I suspect anyone who knew my mother might have been confused by. I have, on more than one occasion, had to admit defeat when reading some threads on the net, simply because the excessive use of the acronym meant that I basically couldn’t get the gist at all of what the writer was trying to get across, IYKWIM...

I guess I am getting old.

Communication is a wonderful thing, but miscommunication can lead to all sorts of confusion, so I must apologise to anyone in Germany seeking a wise and erudite overview of the German M******l F**d (I’m sorry, I just nearly did it again, didn’t I?) because you won’t find it here in Lesser Blogfordshire, and I guess I’ve wasted some of your time.

Meanwhile, if “popularity” for these musings was all that I did seek, I would take the opportunity to insert a lot of random acronyms here, and see what happens.

But I won’t.