Coo-eee, only me!

By the time you read this the crisis will be over and I will be back online. At the time I am typing this I am bereft, missing all my chums, and my virtual fish have probably died by now for lack of virtual food. I must say that I am a trifle alarmed by the fact that it is bothering me as much as it is. Fortunately I do actually have a real life in which I have real friends, one of whom I had arranged to meet for lunch on Saturday, although, (this is a worrying thought,) we originally met via Twitter. As Ipswich has been so busy recently we decided to go to Woodbridge instead. I used to work in Woodbridge and I go there fairly regularly to shop. The lunch was very good company wise and passable food wise but I had done a bit of a reccy earlier in the week and found that the choice is a bit limited if you only want a light meal but want something more exciting than a sandwich, (although sandwiches can be very exciting if you make the effort..) My friend also had the dubious pleasure of meeting him indoors so now when I tweet about hubby she will have a picture in her mind, but I'm sure she could get counselling if she needs it.
I know a lot of people don't get Facebook and Twitter, they think it is a waste of time; they think that if you want to communicate with people you should pick up the phone or write a letter, or visit. For me, however, it has become, in part, a substitute for the bus queue, the coffee machine, the photo copier, the lunch club, all those places in my working life when I used to have little chats with people I didn't really know very well. I would become quite friendly with some of the lawyers I used to talk to on a regular basis because we would find ourselves on either end of a number of transactions, even though I never met them. When I travelled by bus I would see the same people every day and gradually learn more about their lives, interests, hopes and dreams, and listen to their troubles too sometimes, and they would do the same for me. There was a benefit in talking to people who you didn't see any other time. And occasionally I did make a friend who became more of a part of my life. Now, of course, if you are reading this then you don't need to be convinced but I hope I may have given you some thoughts to pass on when someone else tells you that it is a waste of time.
The internet is not, however, only about social networking and I am also struck by how many times in the day I would have looked something up on Google, IMDB, Wikipedia etc. I know that you have to be wary of the information that you find and if it matters then, as a rule of thumb, try to find the same information from three different sources before I start to trust it, but it's mostly trivia, like who wrote the music for a film I am watching, and what else did they write, or do Waitrose sell the particular fruit juice that my mum wants or have I sold anything on amazon today (oh dear, I hope not or I shall get a black mark for a slow response) I wonder if any of you who are into Sci-fi remember Dark Angel which was set in the US but after a terrorist "pulse" had knocked out all the computers so nobody could get at their money, all the Social Security records, criminal records, medical records etc were unavailable and so on and so forth. Now there's a thought