Change of fortunes...

A month ago my Tarot was full of 'surprises' and 'relationships'.
Today it's full of 'long journeys' and 'coping'.

Bwah! If I have to have a long journey that I'm going to struggle to cope with, can't I please at least have a tall, dark, handsome stranger who brings me an unexpected windfall?

You just can't get good fortune telling these days...facebook really should have factored the 'customers only want to hear good news' preference into their online Tarot permutations.

First impressions count...

I'm pretty sure you don't need a marketing background to know that first impressions count..I think my nanna used to say something similar.
And yet, it's like the internet sucks all those common sense rules out of our heads.
With that in mind, here is my (humble) advice to the many patrons of online dating.
If you are serious about attracting someone quality...

• Please don't take photos of yourself with your shirt off. Ick! No one (serious) wants to know that you're sitting in your lonely, beige-walled bedroom with no clothes on talking to strange girls in Ghania who desperately need money to bring their mother/child/bulldog over from the UK.
• Just because you CAN pole dance/do the splits/touch your nose with your tongue...doesn't mean you should do it on your profile picture.
• Do NOT keep all your old girlfriends/boyfriends on your Facebook page so they can stalk your new 'recruits'. When it's over, baby, it's OVER!
• When you take your profile photo, try not to do it in front of wall of pictures of your ex-wife and kids, your mum & dad and the ex-in-laws.
• Maybe these aren't hard and fast rules for everyone but, for me, they sure are big fat squealing warning signs. Warning, warning! Danger Will Robinson!

Of course, if you're reeeally hot...maybe you should have your shirt off in one teeny weeny photo.
;)

Read between the lines...

Suddenly here is another ex-lover chatting away to me on email.

Don't they get it? When I say 'I understand, let's be friends'...after they DUMP me…what I really mean is 'your ongoing presence is a constant reminder of my perceived inadequacies and I wish you'd disappear or at least be publicly and completely unhappy without me'.

Duh!

Generation gap...

For a while there I was talking to my boss on email and kept saying LOL.

It took us about five emails before he worked up the guts to ask me what LOL means.
He thought I was writing Lots Of Love at the end of each missive.

I don't use chat-speak when I write to him anymore...

Every engineer knows...

The use of powerful tools by untrained people can be both dangerous and devastating.
The internet is just such a tool.

& speaking of tools? Why does anyone need four email addresses?
Are they spies? Do they need an email address to give their latest identity credibility?
Are they superheroes protecting an alter ego?
How many 'readers' or 'blogs' or 'feeds' or 'domains' does anyone need?
Just how efficient are these internet users being if, like me, they really don't know what the best medium is - just the latest or easiest.

An email is a gateway for someone to reach you.
You don't have four doorways at your home do you? You use just the one - the obvious one (unless the kids or the tradies have dirty feet).

What happened to one-stop shopping on the internet?
We collect identities on the internet like other old ladies collect novelty spoons, when they should be like cars - bought for functionality. Pretty colours and racy accessories should be a secondary considerations, surely.

I was warned to never trust a man with two phones.
I suspect that someone with several email addresses is equally duplicitous...or a great big sucker for 'the latest and greatest (and shinyiest) social networking site'.
It's cyber-schizoprenia for goodness' sake!

Of course I could be wrong and I welcome your comments...which can be emailed to sasha'ssoapbox@hotmail.com, sasha'ssoapbox@yahoo.com, or sasha'ssoapbox@gmail.com

Intellectual in-breeding...

There was a time when we all thought the internet would open up a wide, world of new learning for its users.
But instead, I think we are simply filling our lives with bigger volumes of the same ol' same ol'.

My BrainsTrust of IT-savvy friends are busy teaching me about feeds and readers and alerts to help me read more of what I already know or like.
But where's the reader that feeds me things I should be interested in, stuff I might like if I stepped outside the perimeters of my own head?
Where's the cyber-librarian catching me at the counter and saying 'you know, you might really like to give this one a go'?

We moan and moan about the consequences of specialisation of skills - but now we have specialised thinking!

Social commentator Faith Popcorn talks about clicking, clanning and cocooning that occurs as people ‘chat’ with their virtual clan, cocooned from the rest of the world, isolated in cyber-space with a handful of people with like interests.
People who have avatars - not real-life wrinkles, fat-rolls and guinea pig laughs.
It’s a filtered, airbrushed, abbreviated world that teaches us nothing about inclusivity or tolerance.
Now, all of you busy, educated, involved people out there who are just enjoying a little peace at home with the convenience of your varied, RSS-filled personal libraries – I congratulate you on your smart use of an amazing technology.
For the rest of you who are sitting at a laptop ignoring the child or partner sitting beside you (like I am) in favour of yet another article on improving relationships, at the risk of sounding like my Mum I say…get up, get out & get some fresh air in you!