Disgusted.

Actually, it’s both disgusting and scary.

So this is the deal – I used to have a homepage on Geocities, when the uni closed down my old account, and before I had the one I use now. Looking for a reason to procrastinate at work the other day, I thought it could be funny to track it down and have a good laugh at myself – there’s nothing I can do about the content, cos I lost the password a long time ago, so I’d just have to sit there and squirm. Which I did, but not in the way I’d imagined.

That long ago day when I last updated it, I’d added a web counter, just to see if anyone besides myself ever looked at it. I think the last time I saw it, it was up around the 50s or 40s. Having lost the address, I had to search for words I thought would have been on it, and eventually found it. You can imagine my surprise when the counter registered a long way about 2 million hits.

At first I thought the counter had broken, but I hit shift-reload, and it went up by exactly 1. So I had to assume that all those hits were genuine, and I couldn’t figure out what on earth had happened, until I read the content again. It was all very ‘this is my homepage and this is what I do, eager breathless blather, eager breathless blather. Except, given my preoccupations at the time (and I guess, now), the page included the phrase ‘suck my clit’ and terms such ‘masturbation’. Other pages, including the actual page called ‘suck my clit’ had less than 100 hits, so the current theory is that desperate people were looking up those words in search engines, trotting off to visit the page, and leaving as soon as they realised it wasn’t about my dildo lesbo fantasies. So, that’s a bit sad, but ok.

Then I worked out that at that hit rate, I was getting about 4386 hits a day, and 3 hits a minute. That’s a lot of desperate people, none of whom are at all interested in my life, the bastards. So one day I want to set up a couple of sites like that, loaded with all the appropriate metatags, where the text merely says, ‘hello, you tragic git. Ok, you can continue your desperate search now’. I do wonder what email I got.

[I have no idea when this was written, the original wasn’t more specific than 1998]