I often imagine the Internet to be operated from a small room in a nondescript office block somewhere with a switch that has to be kept on at all times, and at certain times of the day the cleaner comes in and needs the plug for the vacuum cleaner and that is why we can’t get online. Sunday seems to be a particularly bad day for this to happen with connectivity going haywire for large parts of the afternoon. Why the Internet employs the cleaning staff on a Sunday is their issue, I’d have them in early in the morning for an hour or two every weekday so they could get the job done before we wake up. I know that our morning is another country’s night or afternoon but that’s just tough. If the system is going to work it has to work on Greenwich Mean Time.

Yesterday my stress and anger levels threatened to finish me off once and for all as I had such an ordeal trying to upload the podcast. The Internet connection kept telling me it was ‘excellent’ when I held the curser over the icon in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, yet I repeatedly kept getting the white screen and picture of a sad face.

This was very inconvenient as it seemed to be waiting for me to do something with regards the podcast. It took ages to even get the thing uploaded to the Internet Archive and once the blog page was finally published I couldn’t get the share buttons to work so I had to copy and paste the URL and tweet the links manually, a little primitive perhaps but at least I was able to put out the usual tweets containing tags for each artist in the hope that they would retweet. I had the same problem with Facebook sharing for a while and once everything was complete it was around nine o’clock before anyone could listen to it. Problems with the Internet seemed to be confined to Facebook and Gmail for the main part but I had no choice but to soldier on. I could access everything on my phone but I couldn’t do the more ‘computer-ish’ stuff.

In addition to the obvious ‘please retweet’ posts that I put out on Twitter, one for each artist, I have recently started to do a similar thing on Facebook from The Sunday Alternative page and on my own personal profile. This seems to have had a slight impact on listening figures despite the fact that Facebook is largely a bit of a lame duck as far as social media is concerned (some things never change). As long as the bands and artists share the link then their fans seem to be listening, although for some reason the following numbers on both the Twitter and Facebook accounts for the podcast are low compared to the numbers that listen. To be honest, I have the same problem myself; I still have the word ‘underfollowed’ on my Twitter bio despite my slowly increasing public profile, perhaps this is due to my refusal to engineer a follower increase by buying people or following people simply to be followed back. My official page on Facebook suffers from an even smaller number of people yet listening figures and blog reads continue to rise; it’s a strange world.

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This week’s edition of The Sunday Alternative is here.