Express your individuality (in 1 of 6 preset ways)!

*NOTE: Sorry, folks, I promise I am working on another full-fledged article for later this week, but I feel the need to vent in an old-school rant before cranking out another finished, polished product.

If you haven't noticed, I am doing a little bit of redecorating around ThisIsMyBar.  With a growing readership, it's important to stay fresh and challenging.  More importantly, the nature of my ongoing social commentary is such that anonymity is essential.  In short, my livelihood would be in serious jeopardy if my customers ever stumbled on this blog and put the pieces of the puzzle together.  Plenty of you already know who I am, and that's why you read, but as more and more strangers check in, I have to take steps to protect my identity.

Which leads me to some shit that really irks me, and by "irk" I mean "makes me want to shoot bitches."  I'll be the first to admit my technological knowledge expired in roughly 2001.  Since then, I have made a conscious effort to ignore as much of the digital revolution as I could without retreating to a cave to write my angry manifesto and mail out nail-bombs to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and . . . whoever their equivalents in Japan are (I'm sure they are the ones behind it all).  During middle and high school, I learned enough of the basics about computers and their bastard offspring that I assumed, especially with the constant updates and ever-growing "user-friendly" wave, I would be able to make technology serve my ends when needed.

And I assumed these would go away.

Then, about three months ago, I tried to add the introduction to my blog you currently see displayed under the masthead.  Do you have any idea how difficult it was to add that?  Do you know how close I was to leaving Blogger entirely to peddle my cynicism elsewhere?  Here is the text I started writing at that time to convey my anger:

Hey, kids, did you notice the new intro to the blog?  Right up there at the top of the page, just below the masthead?  You didn't?  Oh, yeah, that's because it isn't fucking there.  Know why?  Google.  Yes, Google, one triumvir of the Holy Technology Trinity (along with Apple and Facebook), who can do no wrong, is currently screwing me like a Black & Decker.  No matter how many times I click "save," no matter how many times I reload the page, Blogger (one tentacle of the Google-beast) refuses to acknowledge a single change I have made.  No error message.  No obvious glitch.  It just doesn't do anything.  Bearing in mind I am using Google Chrome, a browser made by the same company as the blogging program. 

How to resolve this issue?  Why, contact Blogger, of course, and ask them in the politest way possible what the fuck is going on.  Ha.  I repeat, ha.  Now that we're all more connected than ever before, good luck getting a hold of anyone.  Technical support?  Customer service?  Bitch, please.  That's why we gave you the Internet: to get you off our backs.  By providing you with the illusion of endless information, we supplied you with the tools to solve all your own problems.  So leave us alone.  The sickest part?  These buck-passing bastards have the gall, the bile-boiling temerity, to still list Contact Us on their site.  Click that lie, and you'll see your options are either (a) posting your problem on the Forum of Lost Souls, or (b) choosing one of roughly six pre-selected help tutorials.  The only concerns Google is accepting e-mails on?  Trademark infringement and criminal misuse; in other words, shit that hits them in their ginormous pocketbook.  Well, I cordially invite you to go fuck yourselves, you useless, arrogant, monkey-humping, shit-spewing pieces of-

So, yeah, I was a little miffed.  I would have been slightly less pissed if I hadn't already posted a prior problem, the fact that my hit-counter randomly vanishes, on the help forums and received precisely dick in the way of assistance.  I knew it was pointless.  And if there is one thing technology is supposed to do, if there is one selling-point every tech company touts as Gospel, it's that technology is meant to empower you.  Right up the moment it doesn't work like it should.  Then, lo and behold, you are technology's helpless bitch, frustrated and forsaken in the digital wasteland.  The only thing that stopped me from leaving Blogger in high dudgeon, just to stick it to these callous assholes, was the deeper knowledge that, in fact, it would have no effect whatsoever.  Even this small satisfaction, a petty revenge, was denied me, because my opponent was Goliath, while I was the proverbial amoeba on Daniel's ass.  That was probably the most galling to me.  So, I figured shit out for myself, as per usual, and moved on.

Until this recent remodel.

All I wanted to do was change the color of my title text.  That's it.  Simple, right?  Especially given the retard-proof templates Google/Blogger have provided, which I admittedly use to avoid complex design issues.  Well, guess what?  When I selected a different color from the swatch on the template . . . it did nothing.  Surprise-fucking-surprise.  At this point, my expectations are lower than those of a female Bombay slum-orphan.  I was actually forced to go into the goddamn HTML and change the hex-code through trial-and-error.  I have literally not edited code of any kind in a decade.  Britney Spears was not only pop-culturally relevant, but still pretending to be a virgin the last time I fucked around with code.

No, even in those idyllic days of naivete, we weren't buying it, trust me.

So, if things look a little screwy around here, bear with me as I exorcise the gremlins.

But that led me to something that, while not technically an error, infuriates me far more.  On Facebook, I decided to remove any mention of my specific place of employment and replace it on my profile with the simple phrase, "An undisclosed restaurant."  Back when Facebook membership wasn't required by law, you could put shit like this up all the time.  Virtually every field and category on your profile was freeform, allowing users to make up bullshit like Universal Muppetarianism as their religion and pimp-slapping dyslexic reindeer as an activity.  You know, actually showing some kind of originality.

Well, grab your ankles and spread it wide for Zuckerberg's compensatory digital penis, America.

These days, you cannot add anything to your profile unless it already has a page on Facebook.  That's right, unless someone has gone to the trouble of establishing a page for whatever, you are not allowed to post that shit on your profile.  Work for a local company that doesn't need to social-network to stay afloat?  Too bad, dick-cheese, get a real job.  You like a band that has committed the unholiest of holies and not put up a Facebook page?  Forget about adding them to your "Music" field.  Trust me, I tried, just as a test.

Once again, why is this not an option?

Like the old-school "Choose-your-own-adventure" books, you can only pick from three options.  How the hell are we supposed to jumpstart new memes with this kind of authoritarian control?  What, am I stuck in the Jedi Archives being told Kamino doesn't exist just because there is no data-file on it?  (Points if you caught that reference.)  All joking aside, the more insidious side of this is the none-too-subtle message Facebook is sending: if it's not here, it's not real.  Existence as determined by Mark "the Messiah" Zuckerberg.  Plug in or fuck off.  Scary.  Where the hell is my red pill?  If you want to reduce me to a series of 1s and 0s, just another unit in the machine to be quantified, tabulated, and appropriately stored, well . . .

"A website once tried to digitize me.  I ate its server with some Doritos and a pale ale."