Would you like a hand with your packing?

What is the single biggest stressor in the weekly routine of our lives? Cleaning the car? The commute to and from work? Tidying the house? No. The answer is far simpler. Probably the biggest cause of stress-related illnesses today is, ironically, also one of the most necessary tasks in today’s life. The weekly shop.

Now, no matter where or when this is attempted, it has NEVER, in all my years, been a successful and smooth experience. Go early, half the products you want aren’t on the shelves. Go late and the world and his wife (not to mention his mistress, babysitter, work collegues and old school teacher) will be there, jostling for the last packet of fig rolls, and cutting one another up in the checkout queue.

And that’s assuming you’re in the right place. I can’t count the number of times the ‘super’market has been re-arranged, products shifted from one end to the other, with no purpose beyond forcing it’s already-stressed consumers to traipse down every aisle to find the three items they are looking for. This is down with the sole intention of coercively selling the poor, fickle casual shopper a trolley-full of things they neither truly want or need.

And where does all the spare time away from work get spent? With the family? No. In the infernal, commercialised, corporate stresspit that is your local supermarket. How anyone survives with any disposable income or leisure time these days, having braved the chaotic promotions-laden gladatorial arena that is the modern supermarket on a weekly basis, is beyond me.

The cherry on top? The dreary staff in their gaudy should-have-a-brightness-warning-attached flourescent fleece faux-politely asking ‘Would you like a hand with your shopping?’ As if THAT is the time we need help. We have fought our way around the entire shop, found (most) of the products we came for, beat off the rivals for the last rotisserie chicken in the deli, and you think we need help putting things in plastic bags? Oh yes, please help, the gravity of the task is too overwhelming. If there were one thing I could cut out of my weekly routine, one hell-hole I never had to visit again as long as I live, it’s the supermarket.

Oh fuck it. Forgot the ketchup.

The lost art of communication

In today’s technologically-advanced world, every dot-com enterprise out there – that isn’t trying to sell you cheap tits for a monthly fee (and even a few that are) – boasts greater interpersonal communication. From social networking sites to business directories, from instant messaging to internet phones, all of them claim to improve communications between the billions of people inhabiting this ever shrinking planet.

They are doomed to failure, for the very fact that they are trying to over-simplify human communication. Face-to-face meetings provide such a wealth of information to the brain that there is little room for misinterpretation. From body-language to inflection, the choice of words to the emotion conveyed in the eyes of the speaker, the human brain is inundated with signs and signals to interpret, all of which complement and contextualise the others, resulting in a highly complex, but ultimately very thorough picture of what is intended to be conveyed.

All these technological developments add to the ways in which we can NOT communicate with one another effectively. The problems are nigh endless. From the first couriered letters and telegrams of old (Galipoli, anyone?), right through to modern text messaging (oh, I beg your pardon, ‘txt msgs’), communication is highly fallible when not accompanied by visual signatures. Sure, you can add a smiley or a ‘lol’ to convey your emotion, but it is in such a dilute and impersonal, generic form, that it means very little to the recipient. It is almost as though it is part of the punctuation, but with less gramatical impact, seeing as punctuation has been all but eradicated these days anyway.

Whilst phone conversations retain the information of the tone of voice and inflection, these too can often be misinterpreted if not accompanied by visual contextual reinforcement. For instance, sardonic wit can often carry across as snappy or defensive, when in actual fact it was delivered with a smirk and the brightest of dispositions.

Whilst vastly limited in terms of informational content (often by the number of characters – lets remember, after all, text messaging was originally a SECONDARY feature of the mobile phone, for when you had only a short, non-urgent message which could be briefly and clearly expressed in a few short sentences), this is far from the ONLY drawback of these new technologies. Connectivity is the other main problem with these services. Who hasn’t received a text message until days, even weeks, after it was sent? How familiar are the words “*some text missing*”? And how often does one find oneself pressed to a window or standing balanced on one leg in the middle of a field trying in vain to retain sufficeint mobile coverage to not only send a message, but receive a reply and hold something that vaguely resembles a conversation? Furthermore, the internet is far from infallible in terms of IM connectivity; video calls and social networking boards also suffer from server failures, download limits and network connectivity issues.

All told, whilst the methods of communication were far fewer in the past, communication was almost certainly more effective when it did occur. lmfao @ tht

Why Blog?

Has the world got dumber? Surely it wasn’t that long ago that news meant something, that writing was a skill and that the common man would scribble thoughts into a private diary if he or she felt the need to express themselves. To themselves. If it’s private, who on earth is the intended audience? The author in the future, or the author in the present? A collection of memories, or a means of coming to terms with one’s own thoughts?

Honestly, I don’t care, I digress.

The point is that endless hundreds of people in this new ‘enlightened’ internet age now blab away to themselves on the world wide wilderness, but the question still remains; who is their audience? Are they hoping people will actually read their online drivel? Is the public domain really the place for expressing thoughts that would previously be privately recorded?

Then again, not all of the millions of private blogs are diaries. The world and his wife now presume they are educated enough to fulfill some lifelong purpose to write for the world, a public service, enlightening peoples lives and exposing the ‘real’ world, and delivering a reality check. What these scores of pseudo-journalists fail to realise is that no-one cares, and no-one will read their blogs. With such a saturation of crap on the internet, who on earth is going to read, nay, even bother to look for, your shitty self-effacing attempt at a look-at-me blog?

Which is precisely why there is no reason to continue typing. But what the hell, I’ve just gone and proved my own point. So here’s to you, world; fuck you.