28 December - Poker revelations

Boy I love the net. I think it's one of my overused phrases but it's true. So, am here at work, minding my own business, when poker enthusiast colleague comes to tell me of a website where 'if you know which pokerwebsite your boyfriend uses, and what's his username, you can check when he plays/how often, how much, earnings and losses and so on'.
'You're having me on!' 'No, it's true, do you know his details?' 'Yes of course I do, have sat on his knee many a time when he's played and explained whey he was doing well/about to win etc, and then left him to it only to ask in the morning if he'd won and er... no, some giant bad luck had struck and dealt him a run of bad cards etc etc'.

And so it is... it's true, you can do it. Ask me how if you have a gambler in the family. Not only does the site give you all of the above but it helpfully also supplies the information in graph form, pie charts and all manners of scientific, incontrovertible evidence of gambling activity. I'm sure he doesn't know how much he's lost over the months. Yes, notice the use of verb. There's no winnings. Or rather, they never match the losses. And they're enough to keep me in designer handbags, not that I want any.

However, only a couple of days ago did he volunteer that he'll not play in 2008. Oh really??? So for now, have printed the body of evidence, stored in a drawer and will make myself not check again until the end of Feb (I'd like to have a nice Valentine thank you very much) but I won't be able to hold myself back from checking at some point and woe betide he who breaks one of his promises to me....

13 July - Facebook & Facebox

Browsing on Facebook, I’m considering how tedious all this is. It’s a full time job to sign up to these things and keep up with them. These teenagers (and Andrew Neil and Piers Morgan of all people, both friends of G) must have a double life. I certainly can’t be arsed and try these things out just so I know what am talking about at parties. Turns out that a few months back when I signed up to Facebook (and promptly never logged on again after receiving silly ‘wltm’ messages’ from losers) that I had actually signed up for something called FaceboX instead (now part of netlog).

No wonder I spent fruitless time searching for my friend G in order to view some of her friends she mentioned at dinner. She was not on Facebox but on faceboOK. Doh! So I did sign up and nearly, almost, fatally, tragically, in one of those press ‘send’ and send to the entire world of work one of those emails that says ‘Had fantastic sex last night with our Managing Director, took only a year to get him to do x, y, z but boy was he pleased to be f ucked by 3 guys and 6 women’ (er no, not happened yet, don’t worry, that will be the day) I almost emailed my entire hotmail account address book accrued over ten or 15 years with a request to be my friend.

The hair stood out on my head (and It’s very long at the moment) as I managed to say FUCK not too loudly but at least half a dozen times and realised I could untick all names offered. As I stared at 240 names of which possibly 200 are no longer interesting/valuable and half are probably hate mail type of contacts now, my life flashed before my eyes. How sad would it have been to receive a Lisa would like to be your friend or vice versa type email. Only saving grace would have been the fact that conveniently am not Lisa on Facebook or Facebox because life’s too short to not use pseudonyms when you can. And so hopefully addresses would have thought ‘who??’ but a few would have recognised the body part that represents me on my photo.
Disaster averted. Major sigh of relief. But Gosh, a where are they now reverie could start and last the whole afternoon, if it wasn’t that I’m busy at work for once. Er, uhh, yes, admission, I do these things at work. Don’t you?