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The Point of No Reply

I don’t know why I do it. I don’t know why I torture myself.

A couple years ago I signed up for a local dating website. It had the standard items to fill in: what are you like, what do you want in a mate… that kind of thing.

I kept my profile up for several days and even added a picture (something I almost never do on a website). A couple days after creating my online persona I go to check the whopping amount of responses I’ve gotten. I log in to find the unfortunate wording:

“You have 0 friends”

That was a little harsh to read the first time I saw it. I have no friends. There’s no one on this site that found me even REMOTELY interesting. I will remind you that this was a LOCAL website and there weren’t that many people on the site.

I realize this is just semantics but isn’t there another way to say you haven’t gotten any responses? Does it have to get personal with the word ‘friends’? I don’t know – I can’t think of a nice way to say it either but just because I can’t think of it doesn’t mean that someone can’t? What I mean is: there is a nicer way to put this; I just don’t know what it is.

So, I get into reading these things called ‘Blogs’. It’s kind of like reading someone’s diary. People hide behind this anonymity thing. It’s kind of cool.

So I start my own (natch).

I also read others. I’ve even seen blogs end because they felt like no one was reading it. “So what?” I think to myself. Until it happens to you…

I signed up for this service called ‘Feed Burner’. It tracks how many people go to your blog and breaks it down per day, per week, whatever.

So I give it a couple days. I checked back: Yep, not one soul has crossed that boundary. I really don’t understand what they’re counting because I checked my blog from work and I think Superman still reads this thing. So who else are they NOT counting?

I checked it right before writing this particular entry and it still said I had no hits. Needless to say I will be canceling my account with this service because they are clearly not getting it right.

It makes me wonder about the important messages that are floating out in the world that are not being picked up by humans. How much logical information from bloggers or newspaper writers is being passed over?

(sigh)

You know, I was getting all ramped-up to go on a total rant just to be disarmed by some music that I had playing in the background. There’s a song by Pat Metheny called “It’s For You” that gets me in the ol’ melancholy-bone every time.

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