Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Wikisurfing is fun [1]

If you have a job that requires you to sit in front of a computer that is connected to the internet, chances are you have experienced WikiSurfing (when a better name strikes me, as it often happens when I am over the can (which is an euphemism for shitting), I am going to replace WikiSurfing with that word and erase this long and pointless sentence where I give TMI (too much information) and use too many brackets…(ok?)). WikiSurfing, as the net-addicted amongst you might have already guessed is when you start off reading one article on wikipedia, jump to another article midway through the first one via a link and keep doing this for 2 hours until you end up with tons of guilt and half assed knowledge about a variety of vaguely related and often pointless topics.

This happens to me all the time but today I think I have a crowning achievement in terms of maximum randomness. Trying to get some work done I tried to find an article explaining “spherical modes”. Exactly 1 hour later I was reading about “Megan Fox”. I have no idea how I managed that but I was glad my natural instincts led me well. Yet the whole process amused me to no end. I have no recollection of my journey but my destination taught me that Megan Fox is engaged to some random dude and believes in pansexuality (which isn’t something as kinky as I had imagined).

Megan Fox could keep me entertained only for so long (cuz it wasn’t she in person!). I quickly moved on and kept surfing when I came across an article where one of the sentences was ...he was however hit by a car which led to... and the words hit by a car were linked to an article about Motor Vehicle Accident. This means that there was a person who decided that the phrase 'hit by a car' might not convey enough information and took the effort to edit the page in order to link to the other one.
Nice! My faith in the bottomless pit of amusement that is the internet was reinforced today.

POST SCRIPT: After typing out the above, I put aside my laptop to visit the restroom (which is again a euphemism for shitting. Who actually rests in a restroom?). As it often happens (and I have a vague recollection that I already mentioned this) I had many thoughts while “resting in the restroom” and one of them was to google wikisurfing before posting this. Turns out, it is a word which is already in use, has an entry on urban dictionary and a bunch of people have already blogged about this. My instincts had led me well once again. Normally I would have scrapped the entire post due to the obvious redundancy but I decided against it (as is obvious) only because I wanted to share with the world that I have awesome thoughts while going dookie ( ;) ) and sadly these are no better than most of the world's!

References
[1]: Personal experience of the author. Not a reliable source.

2 comments:

Golu said...

what about youtube? Come on now that can really be entertaining..especially when the related videos are SO NOT related!

The dreamy nomad said...

And i have no idea how i stumbled upon this blog!