Social media, soaps and me.

So, previously, my laptop broke, and I had to endure pretty shite customer service to get it fixed. Not the worst ever; that would be a certain well-known music retailer, but still pretty bad. I wrote about it here. The other month I managed to drop my laptop. I am a butterfingered fool. Luckily, I was forking out for some pretty comprehensive cover, and was able to, after an attempt to fix it, get some money to put towards a replacement. While the service was pretty slow, it was, on the whole, much better.

A consequence of this enforced laptop drought was that I had to work a little harder for access to social media – either borrow my wife’s phone (I don’t have a fancy phone myself - you remember how much I love phone shopping) or frequent the local libraries. I love our libraries, as well you know, but for books, not for spending my time pissing about of the Book of Face. So, I took pretty much 6 weeks out.

The e-mail build up was truly horrendous – most of it shite. Amazon recommended some stuff I’d never watch in a million years because of something I watched, and there were many, many e-mails from Facebook frantically telling me of everything I’d been missing and all the wonderful people I could be friends with (let’s not dwell on the fact that some of them were people I had been friends with but had unfriended me previously), and Twitter wanted me to know all the interesting things people were tweeting every day that I was missing.

I logged on and…it was just as if I’d been on the day before. It was like watching Eastenders for years and then missing it for a few months. Coming back to it you find that after 5 minutes you’ve already caught up. Coming back to Facebook and Twitter after 6 weeks was exactly like that.

I am a fan generally of social media – it’s useful, it is a fantastic way to connect with people all over the world that you have more in common with than many of the people you know in reality, and it is a useful way to keep in touch with, well, whatever you want really. But, it’s worth not connecting for extended periods at times so you remind yourself that it isn’t essential and that life trundles on pretty much as it always did, even without you seeing what some dude had for breakfast one day.

Anyway, gotta go. I need to check to see if there are any new cat videos.