All Right, All Right, so it’s been a long time coming.
Months in fact since you received the gift which keeps on giving – i.e. one of the Captain’s blogs.
Reason is of the simplest – I have been busy – alright! My apologies, especially to the bloke last week who told me (in person) he was missing the missives if you get my meaning. Come to think of it how did he know it was ME, after all the Captain thing is supposed to be a pseudonym to deflect legal action – a sort of antisuedonym if you like (that last one got the spell checker all excited).
So what has stirred me enough to pull out the quill and Quink again all of a sudden you may ask?
Actually it’s probably because I feel like death warmed (slightly) up at the moment (grandson’s virus thanks) and it doesn’t take a lot to get me aggravated.
This time it’s the PR group who send the Handy Shipping Guide mailbox different videos every day with the most sensational content they can find that lit the blue touch paper.
Today’s was some poor blokes getting wiped out in a plane crash which, as usual I didn’t bother opening.
This is not journalism guys.
A fat, sweaty bloke sitting on his arse scouring the internet for stuff he can cut and paste and post out to mutts like me isn’t journalism.
I should know, I do enough of it myself.
The angry rant led me on inevitably to consider the amount of pure crap which is being sent every day into the mailboxes of poor schmucks like yours truly whether invited or not. Time was all we had to whinge about was the unsolicited post dropping on the doormat.
One then found it was possible to prevent most of that by signing up to ‘no crap on the doormat’ scheme or whatever it was called. The effect was akin to shooting an elephant with a spud gun and the fibrous diarrhoea continued unabated.
This led to the fax scams, more uninvited junk arriving until you signed up again – somewhere else in a vain attempt to stem the flood. Then the bloody phone calls – yes please I want the TPS (telephone preference service) that one has now been hijacked by some other smarmy scam artists who managed to wangle the top spot on Google so if you now don’t get the search details right they will stop your calls – for about £30 a pop.
Same thing by the way has happened with mail redirection – search with the wrong keywords and you get another crummy mob selling you the same postal redirection as the official Royal Mail version - only uplifted pricewise by about 80%.
And so onto that e mail spam and the junk filters that, when set up, surgically remove the important stuff like Aunt Muriels wedding and the fact your tax return is due.
It seems the world, having advanced technically and technologically in so many ways in the past few years has left a big hole with thousands of people unable to find proper jobs. The answer – absorb their ‘spare’ time like a sponge in a puddle – invent things, or rather have them invent things for themselves to take up the slack hours, something useful if not productive – actually usually demeaning, debasing and/or pointless. Call centres for catalogues, PPI and energy scams - and that’s just the ‘professionals’ as for those poor souls with too much time on their hands in the amateur sense, well, you know the form.
People try to justify Twitter and Facebook et al by pointing out the ‘advantages’. Well here’s the news folks, they may very well be outweighed by the disadvantages.
For example Twitterers seem to exist in three categories, morons; people who like to read what self-important morons write and lastly business people, most of whom tweet but don’t actually have a meaningful purpose in doing so.
I did think the Twitter thing might have a purpose when Jimmy Carr wrote a piece saying he was on tour, alone and bored so he ‘tweeted’ that he was in the local Nandos. Sure enough, like moths to a flame, a couple of dozen people turned up to keep him company. Then it occurred to me, would I want to be in the company of anyone who had nothing better in their lives than to stalk my every thought on the Twittersphere? Let alone a whole bunch of them, let’s face it the nutter on the bus has to be somewhere in amongst that lot.
So here we are today with so much information flying about out there that if you plug into the wrong format for what you need to know, as opposed to what you think you want to know, you’ll just be wasting your time and if you are fool enough to publish your thoughts on those media you might cop anything from a groomer (not the poodle type) to an cyber bully or even (if you get really lucky) a psycho killer.
Now you might say ‘but you’re the one typing this (lately very infrequent) blog!’ And of course you are correct, but stick a comment on the bottom (bearing in mind the average one I receive is some mystery computer generated ad for handbags in Taiwan) and you’ll notice that the Captain, he don’t have no truck with that stuff, it will vanish off this site faster than the Jimmy Savile fan club.
Dodgy? Surely Not!
You might also have thought by now that I’m not a fan of Facebook and guess what? You are correct, it has uses but it seems to me (and my contact is very limited with the medium) that it causes more arguments than makes its existence worthwhile (you know ‘Maureen, why did you put that picture taken on Tracie’s hen night of me kissing the goat’s a**e up on Facey?’)
Thing is, as has been said before many times by those more knowledgeable than I, this stuff, dependent on the exact medium, STAYS there and the views we hold, the friends we have, the things we say, the drugs we take and the acts we perform when young may be undeniable and there, red in print and photo, to haunt us in later life.
So has the Skipper got a web phobia?
Certainly not, however he likes to think he’s a little choosier than some. Skype, e mail various browsers – fine. As for the rest Thanks but no Thanks.
As the rabbit says that’s all folks, when the next one appears who knows?




