Dad here LOLing, LMAOing and ROFLing all at the same time

Saturday, the day my father often calls me. You might know Clive he has appeared on these pages before, mostly being angry about some uncouth customer with a tattoo and an Arsenal shirt wanting to know why they don’t have ketchup or why the sausage roll had chocolate inside it.

‘It’s a pain au chocolat!’

Aside from this my father is a very ambitious, driven and passionate man. But he is also frustrating, completely disorganised and well, a bit mental. He owns something called the Town Mill Bakery; a company which ‘puts fresh bread straight back into the hands of our customers by bringing baking and bakers back to the high street and away from soulless, faceless industrial units and lorries trundling up and down the motorways’.

‘Yeah whatever mate, have you got any sticky buns? No? Well this is too poncy for me; I am off to Gregg’s for a cheese and ham slice and a can of Coke.

Anyhoo, being the pioneering businessman that he is, he knows that he needs to use Internets to get his message out there on how they bake bread in an organic, fair trade, all the ingredients contain real artisan baker’s fingers in type way. And my Dad fucking loves the Internet, he thinks it’s brilliant and by far the most significant invention of the last 50 years. Trouble is he has not got a single fucking clue how to use it.

The best analogy that I could come up with today, is that he is like a 13 year old boy with a hard on, £100 and a date with Kelly Brook. He knows what he wants to happen, so desperately he can visualise it in his head, but has no idea whatsoever on how to get there or where to even start. In short Dad has no strategy. For Dad, strategy is an obstacle not a means for getting from A to B.

Now this can be charming, people say ‘oh he’s a bit out there’, ‘he’s an enfant terrible who lives life by his own rules and consequences’. For me, who has dealt with this for the past thirty odd years, it’s just psychological equivalent of rubbing your knuckles on a cheese grater. Not least when we have our Saturday talk and he asks how Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr works and how he can get one. His logic for asking me is that as a teenager I was able to tune in the telly and therefore am an IT genius and a social media expert – well why not, everyone else seems to be?

Have you ever had to try and teach someone in their sixties how to use a social networking site? Then have you tried it with someone who is as belligerent and impatient as my father? I think only probably bomb disposal in Helmand Province might beat it for stress levels. All the little niggly bits that we are use to doing to get these accounts, like put in your email address (’I don’t know it, I never use it’), some pictures and set a password that you can fucking remember are the norm, but Dad does not see why HE has to. So then asks me to show him, then gets bored and asks me to do it for him, because according to him I am good at this sort of thing and like it.

His timing is impeccable when asking for this advice. I am normally in the middle of a meeting, making dinner or (ahem) otherwise engaged. In other words, doing things that are of personal interest, but these are of no concern as he needs know to how he can register his Oyster card right now. He lives in Dorset but still has to have one. No, me neither. My default response has now become ‘JFGI’, which I had to explain means ‘Just fucking Google it, Dad’. Now, Internet abbreviations that’s the next minefield for us to cross, as not only is Dad dyslexic but he has whole a new language to learn.

To give you an example, when I told Dad I was writing this blog I sent him the title. He responded with:

‘Very funny, when I read that I laughed out loud’

To which I responded

‘You mean you lol’d’

Eight hours later I got another email saying

‘Lol…I just got that!’

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Since my new year got off to its stunning start, I have been debating a return, at some point, to the world of internet dating. When I first went on one of these sites I was pleasantly surprised by how the concept worked so well. It got rid of all the trepidation: you know that someone fancies you, you know what they look like (sometimes), and you are meant to be able to deduce whether you actually have something in common.

But revisiting the site (it’s the one where you’re someone’s friend) got me thinking about how annoying some of these profiles can be; and can I be arsed to traipse through all these profiles to find a good one? And there are loads. Initially this is fun, but as someone said to me, then it does feel like you’re perving in some kind of cyber pub, rather than looking for someone you genuinely want to be with. Maybe that’s just me.

One of the most common annoyances with internet dating profiles is that they try to cover all the bases. If I have to read another profile about a person that is equally ‘at home’ going to a pub as they are to a club, going to a festival or chilling at home, bungee jumping or fucking fly fishing, then I’ll scream. If you don’t give us a point of reference, then it’s difficult to start a converstion for fuck’s sake!. Then girls write about what a great friend their girlfriends are, and all the girly things about them they adore.  They say things like: ‘She loves Gok’s Fashion fix and watches it religously every week’ — oh yeah, because we men love that show. Or it’s: ‘She’s such a good listener and you can turn up with a bottle of wine and tell her all your troubles’. Good God! And my personal favourite: ‘If she was a character from Sex in the City …’.  Men absolutely, positively, and without a doubt could not give fuck what character she is from Sex in the City … unless it’s Samantha, of course.

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It is in the news today that News Corp and Microsoft are going to team up so we can only search for Rupert Murdoch’s news stories on MS’s worse than ever search engine, Bing. They just don’t get it do they? The Internet is no longer about large-scale news corporations delivering our news to us en masse. We can get what we want direct from the people and things that we are interested in. Stephen Fry, speaking at the Twitter conference, spoke about no longer having the need to pay for PR machine to get a message out about new book, TV show or film. He posts that news on Twitter then numerous followers disseminate that information.

I no longer want to buy a hard copy issue or online version of a newspaper I am not going to read all of. It’s a waste of my money and the old way, a waste of paper. I stopped buying the Guardian on Saturdays, because all I really wanted to read was Charlie Brooker and throw the rest in the bin. Surely it will not be long until Charlie will have his own site where a Google ad program will ensure that he gets all the advertising revenue direct to him, rather than it going through Guardian Newspapers who pay him a salary. I can’t see why he has not done it already; maybe he’s a lazy fucker.

Stories now come straight from people who it is happening to, who just want to tell the story and have no political, social or business agenda or motivation. I would like to think that having seen the sort of shit that Fox News pumps out, people will be sensible enough not to part with their hard earned cash to Murdoch. He is just whining because his business model of many years is looking obsolete in a medium that is moving so fast he can’t catch up. Oh and why would you pay for the Times Online or The Sun website? They’re shit. Slow, badly laid out and still thinks it’s newspaper trying to be a website rather than the other way round.

I find that more and more I don’t look for the big media channels for my news or reviews of stuff. Look at Trip Advisor as a great example of user generated content, I want to know from a person who went and paid for somewhere, what they thought of the accommodation and facilities. Not from a journo who got the whole thing for free, got paid for going and then has to bow to the ad revenue from the hotelier. The Internet is ours to stop that sort of bullshit, so let’s use it.

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