Social Freak!

I’m an average guy! My friends don’t think of me EVERYDAY! My cousins email me only when they have vacations. My family wouldn’t care to buzz me considering they’ll have to endure the video chat coming up every Saturday anyway! My advisor mails me once a month and my collaborator doesn’t even seem to have an ID of his own! I’m an average guy. Counting spam, looking-for-a-job-mails, the ‘n’ number of Science news updates I subscribed to when I was feeling productive and was planning to make it real BIG in my field and all the regular trash, I might get an average of 10-12 emails per day. That’s about one email every 2 hours!

And yet…

Yet, I HAVE to check my mail once every 36 seconds. I have to see my mouse pointer change to a sand-clock and then back to its original-self proclaiming that I have NO new emails … and I have to do this every 36 seconds. Why 36? No real reason… its an estimation.

This is how its with Gmail. I walk to the rest room. I run back - “Shucks! How many important messages have clogged my inbox?” I take the bus home – I’d think my laptop is screaming and teeming with new mails. I sleep for 8 hours. I wake up and run to my laptop even before I wipe my drool. I check my email … turn back to say Hi to the cute lab-tech … and immediately check my email … lest I dare miss that very important piece of information I have been waiting all my life for!

So is it with Facebook. I religiously click all the links deeply assuming that its my only source of knowledge and ignoring them meant being ignorant about the world. Everyone’s status updates scream out at me asking me to comment. I may not give a DAMN to why there’s a “:(“ depressing smiley next to your status update, more so because I hardly know you but added you only to add to my ever-growing friends list, but I have to add my comment and show my loyalty. I know your status message is a rip off straight out of Bernard Shaw’s home page just for attracting compliments, but I HAVE to click on the ‘like’ button although I don’t even remotely like you for that matter!

So is it with Google. You can Google anything. Including yourself; I trust Google to tell me more about myself than I really know of. I Google for temperature, time and location. I Google for formulae, protocols and recipes. I Google for shaving pimples and tooth aches and body posture. As you talk about a movie I have unheard of, I can Google about it and CONVINCE you that I’m cool and I know everything there is to be known about that movie, about the other movies of the same director, and the sequels and prequels of the movie that exist or yet to be released. I can do this as you talk to me with the click of a few buttons.

Sadly, I’m another of those Internet Syndrome victims! I’ve checked my mail thrice already from the time I have started writing this piece. And it has hardly been more than 5 mins. I also sadly discovered that there are no more status updates I can ‘like’ on Facebook as I have liked all of them already ;( And the darned Google home page never crashes … for some weird reason!

I know I need rehab. The healing process has begun. I have done blasphemous things like shutting down my laptop during the nights. I have closed Outlook Express each time I was done using the system. I have restricted my logging onto Facebook – thrice is all I get during my work-hours. I have borrowed huge library books and downloaded lots of papers … Google can enslave me NO MORE!

Darn! Why haven’t I got any E-MAIL from the past 8 minutes???