Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Dumping ground

Since we last met, I have been to GB twice. Once to drop E off for a week at Grandma's and once to pick her up again. The going was eventful, involving an easyJet flight to Bristol that was two hours late which meant that we missed our "connecting" flight to Newcastle. Luckily there was another one later - but it was also running very late. We got there in the end but much sweat was sweated and much waiting was done at the other end. Thankfully, the coming back to get her was relatively smooth although sleazy BmiBaby did manage to grab £30 from my clenched fist for airport check-in.

Incidentally, while we were sitting on the carpet in the departure lounge in Bordeaux on the first of our long waits, I twittered "Plane delayed by 2 hours. Damn you easyJet" or words to that effect. Within a couple of minutes someone from easyJet had twittered back something about hoping they were keeping us informed. People are obviously being employed to palm disgruntled twitterers off with false concern.

Robots have also been looking out for me. Last week I desultorily searched Locasun for a gite rental in an obscure village in the Dordogne. Since then, my home page on social networking sites has featured a side bar with ads for rentals in said village. I don't find that helpful, I find it creepy.

7 comments:

Le laquet said...

I know ... Gmail does that to me - obviously reading my *private* email and posting related adds - disgraceful!

materfamilias said...

Hmmm, you probably don't want to read the Jeffrey Deaver mystery we read on our holiday. A terrifyingly thin line between private and exposed these cyber-days!

deborah said...

Welcome back, E! Your return makes up for the fact that the swifts have all disappeared from the skies in Bordeaux.

I agree, Lesley, that sounds really creepy. On the other hand anything you do on the internet is monitored, can't be helped.

beaverboosh said...

the robots are everywhere...

deborah said...

According to AO you just have to go into 'preferences' in Safari and tick that you don"t accept cookies ... then you won't get anything creepy in the side-bar.

BeefKing said...

At the moment it's imperfect. But think where we're headed: in a perfect world manned by more intelligent bots, you'll only ever get ads that you want to see. Once they get good enough at it, you'll look forward to the ads, because they'll truly have your number.

BTW, it's not out of concern for the consumer... better targeting saves advertisers money. But it works out for us too, in that gorgeous future where we only ever see ads for the things we genuinely want to buy.

Dick said...

Spooky. Switch to Mac. We get the odd bit of spam in email and that's it.

Confinement

Being confined indoors most of the day, just the four of us, is reminding me of the days when my children were wee and most of our weekends ...