Wasting time for fun

Comedian Steve Day has a good return from thousands of hours on Facebook: one gig booking and one lost friend

Internet? Nah, never use it.

Except all the time. I log on to Facebook for five minutes at half past eleven and the next thing I know it’s two am. As I look back over the time I have spent there, I can at least take comfort in what I’ve achieved in the last 14-and-a-half-hours. Nothing.

I did once get a gig booking from Facebook, so the 11,000 man-hours haven’t all been wasted. I was on MySpace a lot, too, but it feels like the club that no-one goes to any more. In fact, Facebook caused me to fall out with my best friend, Chris McCauseland, who like me is a comic. He’s blind, though, so we’ve got to be friends for that one reason because we’re always put on the same bill together. People think, ooh, we’ve got the blind bloke, let’s get the deaf bloke, see the synergy we could make there! What they really want is the Special Olympics of comedy, “The Aren’t They Marvellous Show”.

“Aw! Look at the way they’re coming up, trying to make us laugh!”

“They’re just like people when they do that, aren’t they?”

This has gone on for the last five years and in all that time I’ve never heard him and he’s never seen me.

I’ve fallen out with Chris because of the top friends thing on MySpace. You can have 52 top friends, but what is the point of being somebody’s 51st best friend? So I’ve cut mine down to eight. The problem, though, is that when you get a new friend and want to put them in your top eight, somebody close to you has got to go.

You don’t get that problem on Bebo, though, because someone there is quite likely to have committed suicide and you’ve always got a vacancy, but on MySpace it’s a problem. I had a new friend, far better looking than my ugly mugs. What was I going to do? Then I thought: I know what I’ll do, I’ll get rid of Chris. He’s blind, he’ll never know.

Two hours later he sends me an email demanding to know what he’s done wrong.

Turns out he’s got some paranoid blind person’s software thing, reporting it all back to him in a voice.

Anyway, the internet. I’m a big one for the online papers. The Guardian and the Telegraph are best for lily-livered liberalism and pedantically-detailed reports of neighbourly disputes over shared driveways gone tragic respectively.

sportinglife.com keeps me up to date with sports I’m most often watching on TV at the same time. I use Digitalspy to find out what happens in the soaps so I don’t have to actually watch them but can spoil them for my wife.

“He dies, doesn’t he?” being one of my favourite lines.

YouTube passes me by, due to lack of subtitles. Maybe one day. Same too for the BBC iPlayer. I long for a repeat of Ann Widdecombe on the news saying, “Let me give you an analogy,” which came up on the subtitles as, “Let me give you anal joy.”

Sorry, I have to go, an event of great importance has occurred. Someone has requested on Facebook that I complete a questionnaire about my favourite ways to be romantic whilst skiing. Byeee.