The unsupervised male and the world wide web

Men and the internet is a bad thing.
We shouldn’t be allowed unsupervised access to so much information. It’s not good for us and inevitably will cost us a lot of money.
For example, before the internet came along a man caught what a woman would call a bit of a sniffle, where as we all know it to be a very serious case of man flu which should never be underplayed or taken any less seriously than a bout of bubonic plaque, we would be sat down for five minutes given a hot Lemsip and a Locket and told to get on with it. Within a couple of days of complaining, lying on the sofa gently moaning and trying to impress upon anyone that would listen the seriousness of man flu and that you may in fact drop dead at any moment, you would, eventually recover and return to normal health, primarily due to your super human immune system and nothing to do with honey flavoured sweets.

However…

Now with the internet within easy reach of most people a man coughs or sneezes and suddenly it’s out with the lap top and inputting your symptoms into Google. This is all very well and good when done in a sane frame of mind; however you need to understand how the male brain works. I have lost count of the amount of times I have contracted Capillary venous leptomeningeal angiomatosis, or had a nasty bout of Yemenite deaf-blind hypopigmentation syndrome.
For some strange reason, unknown to any living being, every man, even if he won’t admit it to himself or anyone else, wants to be ill.

It’s true.

Everything a man wants he gets when he is ill:
Relaxation
Attention
Food
His beloved TV
Playstation
No work
And if he is really lucky and seriously ill a pretty nurse in uniform taking care of him.

Within moments of opening the first page of Google results we will have convinced ourselves that we are on the brink of death, that we have contracted a very serious, probably a very rare disease and should be getting our house in order ready for the big off. We all have the ability now to research our symptoms and self diagnose ourselves all in approximately five minutes of powering up our computers. This is all very well and good except we don’t do that, we don’t do the research bit, we let Google do it and unfortunately the search engine tends not to list the common cold anywhere near the top and if it did we would assume it was a computer error and re-enter our symptoms. We then find the most destroying illness known to man, only to ever infect one in a billion people and yet we have it because we sneezed.
Final.
No ifs or buts’. The all knowing internet says that if I sneeze and when doing so have a slight sensation of light headiness that my internal organs are about to self combust and liquidise themselves, we then skip the rest of the symptoms that should go along with it and rush out to the local GP’s office.
Doctors must hate the internet. They have gone away and trained very hard for ten years for us to walk into their surgery and tell them
“I was looking on the internet and…”
at which point a groan goes out across the collective brotherhood of medical professionals,
“Another internet doctor has crossed my path and will proceed in telling me I’m wrong and how to do my job because the internet says so”
The good doctor knows now that there will be no end to this microchip terror sitting in his or her surgery, no appeasing the “patient” with an asprin, so does the only thing within their power…

They send you off for more tests.

Which just pampers to mans craving of attention and gives him more ammunition to prove he is in fact on the verge of a medical tsunami destroying anything that might foolishly cross him.
The wave of destruction will continue with test after test until one of two things happen.
One: Something is actually found and you discover you really are ill. (at which point life will stand still and you will break down into a puddle on the floor)
or
Two: You will have wasted a small fortune on private doctors, medicines and tests until the money runs out along with your wife, children and family mutt, only to find out that it was in fact just a bit of a sniffle in the first place.

The second problem with the internet, man and losing a vast proportion of his hard earned wages are gadgets. A mans love for all things shiny, flashy, beepy and new knows no bounds.
And now we can purchase the latest must have straight over the airwaves without even venturing outside and even worse without feeling the crisp new notes leave our hand and enter the shop keepers till. This of course is the biggest problem. Most men can be some what unwilling to open there wallet and spend money. So to be able to do it without feeling like you are spending “cash” but instead some kind of cyber currency is an argument with the good lady wife just waiting to happen as soon as the postman is spotted staggering down the drive, burdened by some obscurely shaped parcel.
We can pre order the new thingy so it arrives on our doormat the very day it is released guaranteeing that we are one of the first to try said new thingy, this is very important to man and inherits with it huge bragging rights the following day in the office or at the bar when you can ever so nonchantly produce your latest piece of technological wizardry and watch as your friends eyes fall from their sockets and their jaws drop to the floor. Only to find out the next day that a new thingy has been made which makes our old thingy look like a square next to a wheel. The circle repeats itself over and over again until we have more gadgets on Ebay than Dixons has batteries. It’s soon a race against time for our once top of the range thingy to arrive in the post before it is superseded by another new thingy. If a gadget comes out that has just one more flashing light on it than the one we already own a small voice starts whispering to us… “it must be mine, oh yes, it must be mine”

So to any loving wife, girlfriend or partner out there, do not let your man near an internet capable computer without adequate supervision or you will soon find your home is about to be repossessed, every cabinet full of vitamins and pills, gadgets and enough plastic packaging to send Greenpeace into a coma.