How The Internet Ate My Brain

My submersion into the internet started out slow,
literally, with WebTV, still the greatest, least
expensive, low tech on-ramp to the information
superhighway ever.   

The first object of my  material internet desires was
a new vacuum cleaner.  I didn’t know squat about
vacuum cleaners and nothing made me less happy than
the thought of having to listen to a salesperson’s
spiel at my local department store.  I’d been
overhearing folks talk about finding this and that on
the internet. Maybe I’d try it, too?  They  said you
could go to a “search engine”, type in what you wanted
and find it usually cheaper than in the real world
stores. 

It couldn’t be that easy?  
Oh, but it was.

I thought I must be misreading the numbers, because
how could there be 11, 325 websites pertaining in some
way to vacuum cleaners?  Or maybe the better question
would be “why”? All of them said something to the
effect of, “We have THE lowest prices on the internet,
on the planet even.”  Well, I couldn’t just believe
them, I had to check them out myself. 

All of them.   

I read all about the leading vacuum cleaner
manufacturers, tips on finding the “right” vacuum
cleaner, even experiences from real consumers “just
like me”.  Then I poked around some other sites where
I found jokes about vacuum cleaners, lawsuits pursuant
to vacuum cleaners, poems about vacuum cleaners,
vacuum cleaner fetish stories, personal ads referring
to the solitary function of the vacuum cleaner and on
and on. And on.  Zen and The Art of Vacuum Cleaner
Maintenance was hidden in there somewhere too, I’m
willing to bet.

As day turned to night I decided it was time to make
my first internet purchase.  All that searching and I
came right back to where I’d started, ABC Vacuum
Cleaner Warehouse. Each time I typed in what I thought was all the
necessary information on the order form and hit the
submit button, in red letters were the words, “You are
missing some information”.  I’d go back and realize I
left out my zip code and hit submit again.  “You are
still missing some information”. 

 “What the FAQ?!” 

After finally giving them everything but my DNA code
the victorious “Thank You for Your Order!” message
flashed before my bloodshot eyes.

Less than a week passed and a big box with my Fantom
Fury inside arrived at my door.   Hmmm, I wondered,
what else might appear with the click of a few keys? 

Internet shopping was no longer an unknown world, 
scary  like some said where you might as well just
stand in the middle of the street and hand out your
credit cards to passersby then wait for the internet
boogie man to show up at your front door.

But the internet, I soon found out, was not just about
finding things to buy.  Nosirreebobtailcat!

Pretty soon I was roaring down the information
superhighway.  But then, like on any long drive,
whether I’m a passenger or the driver,  my eyes
started to wander over at what I might be missing--to
the side of that highway.  

I soon discovered About.com and something called a
“discussion forum”, or “message board”.  About.com is
about any subject in the universe---from canning
vegetables to stock market trading, and all
in-between.  I could find folks sharing their wisedumb
on all of it!  And just like in real life, there were
smart folks and smart assed folks, left brained and
right brained folks, a virtual plethora of humankind. 
Or a plethora of virtual humankind?

Of course, just about every site had an index,  stuff
like,  ‘links”, “about us”, “FAQ” (Frequently Asked
Questions) , and so on.   The more I read, the more I
wanted to read.

Mama used to tell me she thought I had a worm in me
when I was a kid.  Worms get inside you and make you
hungry all the time cause they’re eating up all the
food you put inside you.   

I dipped my virtual toes into the “live” chats feature
where I found myself having “conversations” with
people from all over the world!  That was beyond cool.

One night my older brother and I managed to hook up in a “chat room”.  
We could fight like hell without either of us ever
making a sound!  I was  realizing I could spout off my opinions and
give unsolicited advice to thousands, even millions of
people, and whether or not they read all my words, I
was confident there was someone in the woods when my
trees of  wit and wisedumb fell. 

Yummy.

And even a simple minded gal like me could build her
own website--  “in minutes and for only a few dollars
a month”! My website became just another space for me
to agonize over colors and fonts and artwork and
curtains and....well, maybe not curtains.

I was in deep.

I hadn’t played video games more than a few times
since I’d gotten hooked on “Frogger” in college and
spent a small fortune maneuvering an animated frog
across a pond full of lilly pads and monsters. That
was a long time ago and I figured it’d be safe to just
look in on a few “scrabble type” online games as they
were being played.  It’s never been easy for me to
find a scrabble partner in real life, maybe I’d get
lucky here? Besides,  Scrabble has educational value. 

Sure enough I found 9,172 folks on line playing
“Literati”, Yahoo’s version of “Scrabble”!  

Did you know “qaid” is an acceptable word in “Literati”?

I was starting to get all serious and educated and
decided I could use a shot of humor, so I surfed over
to Funnytimes. com.  From there, it was onto Erma
Bombeck’s site, David Letterman’s  and Dave Barry’s
sites, and I even found a  site by some guys called
the Duct tape Guys! Now that was some funny stuff.  I
have a special place in my heart for duct tape,
specifically red duct tape.  

Not to neglect my duties as a citizen, I surfed all
the relevant news sites, TheDrudgeReport.com,
USnewswire.com, CNN.com, MSNBC.com,
TheNewYorkTimes.com.  I read the bios of all my
favorite news anchors. Naturally, “DontBlameMeIVoted4Kerry.com”  attracted me
and I donated some gray matter there.

Then one very early winter morning, I awoke with a
shudder unable to get the words, “public records” out
of my head.  I knew a person could go to their county
courthouse and dig up all kinds of legal documents on
most anybody for no good reason.  Now, I didn’t even
have to drive to the courthouse--- it was all there
for my taking at www.MyFloridaCounty.com and a few
other sites I can’t divulge lest I run the risk of
future self- incrimination.   Wink, wink.

I was starting to feel a little isolated and thought
I’d hop on over to Ancestry.com and try to find some
of “my people.”  I found a whole slew of relatives I’d
never heard tales of,  scattered throughout the
country! We hooked up and burned up the internet lines
with family memories and photos and promises to get
together in real life one day. 

Then there were the photography forums---places like
Photographica.com, Webshots.com, and Kodakgallery.com
where I could post my  photos.  We all did a lot of
“oohing” and “ahhing” over each other’s shots on the
various member “discussion boards”.  

I hadn’t abandoned my love of real books but  I did
start noticing the websites on the back covers of my
self-help books. I haven’t met too many self-help
books I didn’t like, or at least felt compelled to
scan just in case THE answer to total happiness and
success is revealed in fifty words or less.  So of
course, Dr. Phil and Oprah’s sites beckoned me, as did
every author’ site of most of the best-selling books
of that genre offered in this century.    

Some things I wish I’d never found, like  did you know
there’s a syndrome called “burning tongue” suffered by
what looks like thousands of people and there’s like
almost no way to get rid of it once you get it?! 

Then my car’s engine started to make a not- so-funny
sound and I figured I could get some answers from an
automotive repair site.   I got my answers, but not
before things turned “chatty” and I found myself
exchanging stories with other car-chatters about
subjects like which was better, Ford or Chevrolet, 
going on about cars we’d loved, things that had
happened to our cars and in our cars.  

In between all this knowledge gathering and wisedumb
sharing were the e-mails from Mama who hooked up with
her beloved WebTV not much later than me.   She’d
always had a lot to say, more than I could ever listen
to in just one of my lifetimes.  So to be able to read
and respond at my leisure--well kinda at my leisure
cause she gets in a huff if I haven’t sent the “good
night e-mail”  by a certain time each night, was
especially cool.  I’ve saved thousands of her e-mails
to me and hope one day she’ll be reading a few of them
in a bookstore somewhere.

I remember the day I graduated from ordering vacuum
cleaners to ordering dates, no, not the fruity
over-sized raisin kind, the human kind. I’ll admit I
did a better job at researching vacuum cleaners than I
did researching men.  Nonetheless I ordered one (and
even married him).   I still have the vacuum cleaner. 


And that, my friends, is how the internet ate my
brain.  

 Oh, and did I mention E-Bay?