Don't Bother Me, I'm Tracking My Pizza Delivery

OK, this internet stuff is getting out of hand. I had no problem with the internet when its principal uses were to enable you to keep in touch with people you couldn't bother keeping in touch with, to effectively access pornography and to assist people in cheating on university examinations. Now, however, things are just getting ridiculous.

Domino's Pizza are currently having a promotion part of the attraction of which is the ability to track your home delivery pizza on line. This means you can watch it leave the store, drive in circles for twenty minutes, stop to buy some drugs, get lost and then break every speed limit in an attempt to reach your home while still moderately warm. Exactly how empty and wretched does a life have to get before tracking a pizza delivery on line is the most exciting thing in your day? Although I will grant you it is still a better option than eating it.

People are rather funny about the internet and by funny,of course, I mean stupid. On the one hand we love social networking sites yet we moan about the lack of privacy. We enjoying buying things on line but then stagger back in astonishment when our credit card details become the property of Romanian gangsters or gun running goatherds from Tajikistan. It would appear that people have difficulty connecting actions to consequences.

There is, naturally, a very good reason for not connecting actions with consequences. If everybody did that nobody would ever do anything. Take Australia for example. Do you really think the British would have colonised the place if they had known that a little over two centuries later we would be beating them at cricket and introducing a mining tax? Its much more likely that Captain Phillip would have quietly dumped his load of convicts overboard somewhere around the Isle of Wight and then taken his fleet on an extended cruise to the south of France for six months.

Almost every ground breaking advance occurred because those involved were more interested in the discovery than with what the consequences of that discovery might be. It is unlikely that the inventors of the internet were thinking "this will be great for stealing credit card details - note to self; invent credit cards". So, an inability to accurately predict the consequences of ones actions is by and large a good thing. Except when it isn't; then things tend to get very nasty very quickly. On those occasions there is no shortage of knowitalls (like me) who will cheerfully point out that the consequences were predictable. One particularly ghastly consequence of being able to track your Domino's Pizza order on line is the realisation that pretty soon you will be eating the damned thing.