So the other night I was looking for internships online when someone sends me a link. Being a reasonable man, I think to myself “hey you idiot” and I click on the link. Approximate time: 2:25AM. Fast forward 30 minutes later… it has loaded about halfway and has done nothing for the past 25 minutes. I hit the “refresh” button in my browser, hoping maybe it got stuck or something. Right - it was going to be that easy. I resorted to the only thing I could think of at the time and started beating the garbage out of my computer with a small woodland creature.

People keep sending me all these links for Flash animations, streaming videos, and something about “my roommate’s webcam.” What is all this junk, people? All you big-shot jerks with your fancy Cable/DSL/Wireless/T1/T3 connections need to find another hobby besides making us feel inferior. We’re the ones who have to look at ourselves in the mirror each day and know that we’ll never be able to login to our email accounts faster than somewhere around 53 Kilobytes per second. You make me SICK. In the time it takes for me to sit around and wait for the average webpage to download I could probably do a bunch of awesome stuff, like take a shower, smoke a bunch of crack, shave my legs, eat 7 boxes of twinkies, and still have time to read the Bible from cover to cover - twice.

Of course I could always kill two birds with one stone and puff on some crack-pipe while reading the bible, but that would just be wrong. The problem is, only like 10% of these media creations come with “Play” buttons, so whenever you go to do something else, you come back and it has already downloaded and played through to the end. And the “streaming” ones are great here because there’s no option but to download the entire thing again. On a side note, I’m the biggest geek ever.

Where do you draw the line people? Where?! Some of this stuff is actually worth the wait, like this animation, for instance. But I’m sorry guys, I’d rather be shaving my legs and eating twinkies any day instead of staring at a black screen devoid of anything except “LOADING… 1%…. 2%…. …. ….. .. . ….3% ….” Have a story about those unrelenting Broadband Bullies? Send me your comments on the injustices of the 56K prison known as dial-up internet. If they’re any good, I might just post them.