The Dullest Blog: comedy ramblings to inspire the most tedious minute of your week

The Internet

Choice.

A word which is usually seen as a positive (so long as it’s not got the word “Sophie’s” before it). I’m not that big a fan of choice. When I worked in my parents Ironmongers (I was never a very good monger to be honest, whatever people may shout at me in the street), I learned that nothing terrifies the public so much as choice. If a customer asked for something and we only had one version in stock – that was fine, they would just buy it. If we had more than one make, quality, colour or whatever…bewilderment and fear set in. “Oh, I didn’t realise there’d be a choice. I’d better go away and think about it…”

Now magnify that situation a billion-fold. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…the internet.

You wake up in the morning, and head to the toaster. Except you don’t have a toaster, because after the last one broke…you decided to look up the internet for a new model. You spent a day finding a model that suited you. Not just one that made toast…one that toasted the bread “evenly”, had a “detachable crumb tray”, and came in a “fresh, vibrant, funky colour” suiting “today’s busy professional”. Having settled on the model…you then just needed to find a spare day to select the best deal. Any day now.

Anyway, you’d better get yourself out of the flat, you need to go and meet a mate. Shit! Having trainers with a hole in them is really annoying. You could just buy a new pair in town…but they’d probably be cheaper online, wouldn’t they? You can have a look later. Add that to the things to do list.

Of course, you could have met up with your mate sooner, but you were keeping an eye out on Facebook status updates to see if any of your preferred mates were going to be free this week instead. How annoying would it be to be in a cafe with one when you could have been in the pub with another?

At this point you might want to take you mind off all these frustrations by texting your girlfriend. Except you don’t have a girlfriend. Online dating is great. So much choice…that nobody actually wants to settle for you.

Ah, the internet, what did we all do before we had so much choice?

We got on with our lives.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and select some porn to view. If I can just work out the optimum choice based on duration, genre, actress, production company, conventional shooting style or Point Of View…