Bebo Be Gone

If, like me, you shy from junk mail, avoid 'keep me informed' tick boxes, and savour actual human contact above all else, then you may have noted with annoyance, Bebo, the new online service that promises to keep you connected by synchronising address books and essentially replacing a basic procedure – and indeed, the smallest effort – with an automated process.

Bebo sends an e-mail on your behalf, asking the recipient to register for the service in order to notify the sender of your address, which by definition sounds rather pointless. That is until you realise the snowball effect of its marketing. The good people at Bebo make a simple website with plenty of ads, offer a basic service that people have thus far coped without, and use its members' contacts, whom are given freely, to target with relevant advertising.

You'll have noticed something untoward about the e-mail itself. The subject line is always "Updating my address book", and the message continues in the first person, assuming the identity of the sender, but fails to convey any sense of personality. Consider the tone of this e-mail from Piers Thompson, a guy I've not since high school:

Hi

Can you please enter your contact details in my address book. Click on the link below:

http://www.bebo.com/friends/8873160a734712708b21

After we are connected, in the future, any changes you make in your contact details will be sent to me.

Thanks for your help.

Piers

That's alright Piers. But it seems hardly necessary to synchronise our contact details when we've not spoken for what is approaching four years. I wonder if, when certain we have the correct addresses, we'll be more likely to write. And the same goes for the ex-girlfriends, colleagues, someone I met once in Liverpool and even my sister, whom I see often anyway, who have all BeBo'd me recently. To all of you I say 'no.' I will not join your cult.

Worse still is the service provided by www.sms.ac, who continually bully you into joining their mobile phone community, resorting to guilt by the third attempt:

"This is the third request. Should Ed Batlle give up on having you as a friend in his mobile friends network?"

That was actually a shame. I lost a good friend there.

My 5 'til 9

I am lucky, I realise, to have a career that never quite rears off into the cold shoulder of predictability. The daily commute into the fast lane however is made more comfortable with some on board snacks, as I tend to sandwich my work day with hours of bread and butter and banality, enjoying the reliability of my morning, noon and nightly routine.

In the morning before heading to the office I listen to Radio 1, have a bowl of Choco Hoops and watch one half of Will & Grace (meaning the first 15 minutes – not just Debra Messing). At lunchtime I come back to the flat, make myself a cheese and pickle sandwich and watch Neighbours. It's all very mundane. And then something special happens.

Some time after 5pm I leave the world of work for a galaxy far, far removed from reality, an indoor shopping centre named after Charles Darwin, in which only the fittest survive the January sales. Now, in March, I'm certainly in good company and every weeknight trip for my microwave meal is as pleasant as it is necessary.

Marks & Spencers, I've noticed, is something of a hotbed for attractive, affluent, middle-aged women, and the security guard has noticed it too. He stands by the automatic doors, leering in his mock militaristic outfit of authority, more Village People than city cop, and occasionally radios his colleague – over and out – when the hotbed heat up.

I pass them both and sneer before making my way to the food hall, only accessible by way of the women's underwear section. In a store layout designed by someone who, one can only imagine, is having a laugh, the frozen foods section is just beyond the g-strings and d-cups. Occasionally the thoroughfare is blocked and I make a face, the best I can, of a man buying for his wife. It is always my fear that in that situation a clerk might offer her assistance, in which case my course of action would be to, a) say that I was "only looking," b) ask for something in my size, or c) buy the lingerie and find a wife.

Luckily tonight that didn't happen, and I'm comforted by the thought that it probably never will. And so I picked up my microwave meal, as I always do, and thought to myself that while my 9 'til 5 might never be the same there are some things in life I can always rely on. I headed for the automatic doors and the leering guards, now watching the lingerie section with vigilance, and smiled.

Me, myself and i

There have been grumblings from those bastions of integrity, the Op-Ed columnists of the broadsheets, that, as Andrew Sullivan of The Times writes, "society is dead." We have all, with the aid of those pretty, white things, "retreated into the iWorld." Sullivan is not referring to the attractive WASP community of The O.C. but, with his clever inference of the lower case ‘I’, the Apple iPod – friend of the music lover; enemy, as the article suggests, of the regular human being. Yes, the portable music player, capable of storing 15,000 songs, has usurped the mobile phone, cable television and indeed the pocket watch of yesteryear to become the feared slayer of society.

"What was once an occasional musical diversion became a compulsive obsession," writes Sullivan. "Now I have my iTunes in my iMac for my iPod in my iWorld. It's Narcissus heaven: we've finally put the 'i' into Me." What would happen, you might wander, if we tried to take the 'i' out of me. Well, partial blindness, you might say. But just yesterday I became an accidental guinea pig in one such social experiment, when my iPod, damaged under the heavy foot of drunkenness, slept quiet in its dock, while I, in upper case, went about my day - not a wire from my ears, a hard drive in my pocket or a song in my heart. This is my story. iStory, if you will.

9:02am Walk from my flat to the office without the usual spring in my step. Feels less like a music video than usual. I sense a draught in my inner ears and the discordant music of a town waking up. Am also reminded that traffic lights make noise. This makes me laugh.

9:05am Arrive at the office and immediately say hi to co-worker, Pat, without having to fumble around for the pause button on my iPod. With nothing to do with my hands, and not wanting to grope Pat, I fumble all the same, and comment on how great her new hair looks. I do not start up iTunes and instead turn on the radio. It's the news. An Italian intelligence agent has died under US fire while escorting a freed hostage.

11:15am Leave office for meeting. Overhear what I suspect is a conversation about anal sex. Am tempted at this point to walk the rest of the way with my fingers in my ears. The conversation however recalls the Backstreet Boys' song, 'I Want it That Way', which plays in my head. Ordinarily, I would replace it with something more sophisticated. *Nsync perhaps. Instead, I enjoy the catchy hook and eyebrow raising lyrics. I attempt to raise an eyebrow, but can't, and board the train.

2:15pm Arrive in Leeds. The outward journey was pretty horrific. ('Silent Coach' my arse.) And with no music my mind wanders to food. Time however only allows for the purchase of lunch but not its consumption and so, rushing off to my meeting, I push the snack into my jacket. Its plastic packaging rustles whenever I shake hands and introductions are made all the more uncomfortable with a hummus wrap peering out from my pocket.

3:15pm Stomach rumbles throughout meeting. Someone asks what South Yorkshire will do when EU funding runs out. I think of the David Gray lyric, "what we gonna do/when the money runs out," but can't name the song or recall any other lyrics. I begin to dread the train journey back, and the frustration of being unable to locate the track in my iPod music library. Grrr...

4:45pm Train changes at Manchester Picadilly. With the few minutes that I have I cave and visit the Apple Store. The song is 'Nightblindness' from the album, White Ladder. And the daydeafness, finally, is lifted. I turn on, tune in and cop out. If society is dead, I think to myself, then this is its funeral music. Rest in peace, I say, and turn up the volume. Loud.