Don’t you just love it when you get a pop-up that says “Block unwanted pop-ups?” I find this intrusion on my internet surfing to be highly ironic, and at times, humorous.

And I remember the good old days before the invention of the pop-ups. You’d search yahoo, lycos or excite (do lycos and excite even operate anymore?) and the majority of the pages that would come up would be personal homepages. These pages would be about about people’s dogs, cars, or their intense love of limberger cheese.

Truly, those were the golden days of the internet.

There were no pop-ups. There were none of those annoying scrolling ads. (see mtv.com for the worst of these). The big thing back in the day was banner ads. Everybody had banner ads. People even wrote books about them, telling the private person how they could get rich off the 3cents/click that visitors to their site provide.

Gosh, it would only take about 150 clicks from interested consumers in order to pay for lunch at micky d’s. Only 800 clicks to buy the Harry Potter collection (books 1-4), and a mere 100,000 clicks to pay for a semester of in-state tuition at your local community college.

That was then. This is now - banner ads have become so common place and monotonous we don’t even notice them any more. Instead, we are harassed and bombarded with pop ups offering us spy cameras, cheap travel, “free” magazine subscriptions, and reunions with high school classmates - as if i would go out of my way (read: navigate from whatever site I am currently perusing) to make contact with ex-cheerleader Mary Wilson.

If I don’t like you enough to call or send the occasional email, then I’m really not gonna give a flying s that you are making excellent customer contacts in your career as a realestate agent in nowhere, alaska. Read: not desperate enough to rekindle the friendship that never really was.

Funny thought. I will have graduated from high school 4 years ago this May. I will have graduated from Junior high 8 years from this may. I will have graduated from eating glue and learning to write my name (in kindergarten) 16 years ago!

Oh my god!

Posted in Mixed Bag