Miss Ashley Pants

It was a dark and foreboding morning.

Rain gently began to fall. But the battleship grey skies above us weren’t even a sufficiently ominous backdrop for what to was transpire next. As the hardworking nine to fivers shuffled mindlessly from their homes in time to sit in the drive through while awaiting their morning adrenaline needle to the heart in the form of a steaming Venti elixir, they reached for their fourth limb. The one made of plastic and glass.

Thusly, they tapped into in their favorite app. Would there be others posting statuses – cursing a case of the Mondays in some new and funny way? A video of a baby deer having its belly tickled? Some political rhetoric to argue about after Google searching for stats that might support a pre-existing belief? The anticipation’s almost too much for a social media junkie. But it’s worth it. The app opens. We await the news feed to load. And…

…nothing.

Nothing? No news feed? No morning pharmaceutical of Facebook to ease me into the fact that other people exist? Withdrawal set in almost immediately.

Widespread panic.

People scratching at their arms.

Developing twitches.

Was this it? Was the world finally ending? I knew it was coming… but … I’m not ready. Hold my hand. Something needs to be done. I refuse to accept this. Let’s… Call the police?

Mmmyep. In droves, hoards of empty headed humans summoned the services of our professionally trained emergency professionals because Facebook had gone offline. (But wait! There’s more!) Wanna know how long the beloved lookit-me site was down for?

A whopping four hours.

If you’ve spent anytime in Ashley world, you’ll note I’ve my own love-hate relache with technology. But if I’m being honest, I didn’t even notice the damn thing had gone down on Friday. As an egocentric maniac, part of me wants to attribute that to the fact that I took the day off and that the world obviously stops whenever I do. But the reason I broke from technology for a day – and have been breaking from Facebook more and more – is exactly that. Whenever the shiz freezes up, the instant-gratification muscles in my body seize up. And I hate that feeling of emotional dependency on technology. Bizz-dependency on it is quite enough, thx.

Naturally, this story ends as ridiculously as it begins.

Because there’s something sort of strange to me about the fact that the police used another social media site to chastise people who’d called the police…

…because they were so reliant on social media site:

You know our technological social overlord totally did this on purpose – to observe the effect.

That bastard’s always experimenting on us.