Have just spent the last hour setting up a new PayPal account to pay for a book I won on eBay. My old PayPal account had my maiden name attached to it and I couldn’t for the life of me find a way to change my name on the account. Once I had a new account it took a good 20 minutes to find out how to unlink my old account and link my new PayPal account to my eBay account - sheesh! As I used first eBay’s help pages, then PayPal’s, and finally resorted to Google, I thought about how much the Internet has become part of so many people’s lives. Pre-Internet, there was no
- eBay
- PayPal
- Flickr
- file-swapping - music, games, tv…
- BLOGGING
Without eBay I would not have my pen collection
Without PayPal my credit card bill would be far smaller.
Without Google I would have to do a lot more detective work when looking for information.
Without email M and I might never have become a couple! (Really! A story for another time perhaps.)
Without Flickr no one would know that Baubles the Cat is white, fluffy and overweight, that I have way too many books and way too many fountain pens.
Without blogging, well, you would not be reading this!
Oh, and I forgot file-swapping. Without file-swapping, M and I would not have been watching up to five episodes of Lost every night this week! (I better stop now and not incriminate myself any further
)
I sometimes wonder how much time we waste doing things on the Internet. Like when I get sent yet another email with some cutesy cartoon or pet picture or joke. And the amount of energy we all spend on our blogs.

