It’s that time of the week:
“OMG, this job is a monster”
I, along with many of my American brethren, am both blessed and cursed with the luxury and monotony of a desk job. We subject ourselves to mounting this fake wood five consecutive days and stare at this screen 45 hours a week. We gaze longingly out the window (those of us lucky enough to have one) as the day slowly dies and we often find ourselves jealous of the construction workers sitting under a shady tree during their lunch break or the UPS driver who cruises town all day with no one to directly answer to. But alas, we are drug back to our mundane existence pushing paper, coughing into telephones and sucking at the information teat that is the interweb, which is the one luxury I excitedly take full advantage of.
Within ten minutes of turning on my computer I am at my Yahoo homepage skimming the daily news and reading my horoscope in an attempt to prepare myself for what I may be subjected to throughout the day. One consistent anomaly that never escapes me is the stark contrast between “Featured News” and The World News Headlines. Dreadful articles that expel information referencing events which impact our entire world dominate the headlines section. Thankfully, the featured news is filled with celebrity gossip, sports updates and maybe one piece of troubling information such as “Is a New Korean War Next?” When will we abandon the absurd notion that anyone reads or cares about news and dedicate our homepages to what we really want to read about? I want more photos of Ochocinco’s face tattoos and need to stay updated on who Britney’s new beau is. This is the information that enriches my life and gives me impressive water cooler topics. If I wanted to bore my peers with facts and current events I would read a newspaper.
Obviously I am not an advocate of ignorance, but I am sick of reading about things that don’t directly affect me in the instant that I read it. A bomb goes off in Pakistan and kills a dozen people almost every day; that does not change the fact that I still have to wait in line FOREVER at my Starbuck’s every morning to get my tall half-skinny half-1 percent extra hot split quad shot (two shots decaf, two shots regular) latte with whip. It has no bearing over the fact that I have to get up 15 minutes early the days that I want my cinna-melt twists from the Dunkin on 8th st. because that damn real estate office up the street always buys them out by 7:45. Give me information that I can use to succeed in my daily life, don’t bombard with things like “GM sells off to Fiat” or “Remote Pacific island agrees to take 17 Guantanamo detainees” I don’t even know what a Guantanamo detainee is, but as long as they aren’t standing in the way of my gas pump, I really don’t care.
I know that things are a mess; you would have to living in the south or some other poor-people country like Cuba to not know that, but save it for the nightly news. Any information that you can’t fit into that half an hour isn’t really worth sharing. Leave the interweb alone and let it entertain like it was meant to do. I just want my celeb updates, horoscope and weather information. The rest of that nonsense is for the birds and should be let go once and for all. Don’t change the interweb, for the interweb is America.
