The internet has gone rogue

I'm glad you brought this up, because lately I have been thinking that the internet has basically stopped trying.

Gmail used to really creep me out but now I am losing respect for them. Remember when you were pregnant with baby, but hadn't told many people yet, but we would talk about it discretely in our email communications? Well during that time gmail used to slather it's side panels with ad after ad for baby products and I used to think shut up for pete's sake gmail! We are trying to keep this on the downlow! But even while I was thinking that, I had a grudging respect for it because it was reading through all the euphemsisms in our emails to see that we were talking about a baby.

These days it takes no times to listen, I mean really listen, to what my emails are saying and it just makes the most obvious association it can find. Like the other day, when everyone was emailing back and forth about what they were going to make for the italian dinner, Gmail tried to get me to buy some Flora pro-active margarine. As if I would ever buy margarine. And if I did, as if it would be margarine that is named after an acne treatment. Gmail has no clue.


But I have an even larger gripe with the internet. A little while ago I was writing an email to my boss to tell him that during the course of an investigation, I had found something juicy and was going off on a tangent to investigate it further. As I was writing the email, I remembered that I had heard Sarah Palin's staff used to describe her frequent departures from the planned course of action as "going rogue". I thought it would be somewhat amusing if I described what I was doing as going rogue in this email to my boss. Because I like to make sure that people have the best chance of being amused by me, I also thought I would include a link to somewhere on the inerweb that describes how Sarah Palin's staff used this term to describe what she was doing. So off I went into the internet to find a link. Do you think I could find such a link? No, no I couldn't. What I found instead was an urban dictionary definition that claims 'going rogue' is a term used to describe certain sexual practices, the kind you should never talk about in an email to your boss. I'm not linking it here because I don't want to get in trouble. Since then, Sarah Palin has published a book called Going Rogue so I guess she has kind of reclaimed those words again and you can probably look it up without fear of getting in trouble. Anyway. At least the internet helped me get out of a potentially embarassing situtation that time. But I still wish gmail ads would listen to me a bit more.