Tobe Frank: I broke the internet

To be frank, we live in one of those places where the internet is so slow you could bleed out from a paper cut whilst waiting for a video to download from your favourite site. Sometimes it’s so slow, you can actually go visit a place, stay for a weekend and come back before you’ve had a chance to read the review on it. When something goes viral, by the time I get to see it, there’s a vaccine, an antidote and the root cause has been eradicated.

So I guess I’m just saying we have slow internet.

And while I sit here waiting for a page to download, what is it with all these phrases now, that people use to describe something popular, big, bad or breaking. If something is not ‘Epic’, ‘Mega’, ‘gone viral’ or ‘trending’, it doesn’t exist. How can something that has 547 Likes be going viral? It’s not even a statistically relevant number! It’s like, 0.000008% of the population thinks your photo is cool. There’s more punters down at the local bingo hall and they don’t call that an epidemic! It doesn’t even have a sniffle let alone a cough or anything that even remotely resembles needing to go to the doctor. It is most certainly not a virus.

Then there’s all these videos where you’re lead to believe you are about to witness something ‘epic’. OK so riding a 20ft wave whilst being chased by a tiger shark…that’s epic. Riding your bike into a tree is not. Hula-hoops, yoyos and tie-dye shirts, that’s a trend. Taking a photo of yourself posing and pouting in the mirror is not.

Or my personal favourite, ‘Kim Kardashian’s butt broke the internet’! Seriously people, Mrs West’s butt did not send global stocks into free fall nor did it cause murderous hordes to gather at the bank due to ATM’s being down. It did not halt shopping sprees on Amazon or Ebay. The internet was still very much alive…which is more than can be said for the internet in my local area though!

And while I’m at it, our computers have a lot to answer for too. Recently mine randomly decided to shut down mid sentence. After powering back up again a caption appeared – ‘Your computer was restarted because there was a problem’. That’s it. No more, no less. Just a problem. OK. Care to explain? Nope, righteo then.

How does that come to being? Wouldn’t you just love that setting in life – the ability to restart because there was a problem? Reboot and hope to God the problem has gone away. No, try again….ah there you go. Don’t know what it was, but it’s not there any more. Maybe this could be the cure for cancer and other terminal illness? Maybe our governments should try this more often. ‘Sorry folks we made a mistake. Just bear with us while we reboot’.

Anyway, my internet is still not working so I have thrown it in the bin. Now Tobe Frank really did break the internet!

Tell us, do you feel Tobe’s pain? What’s something you have had to deal with lately?