ihatehumans.ca made it a whole year! This calls for a victory celebration!

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My iPhone has dramatically changed the amount of time I spend connected. In an instant I went from connected “most of the goddamn time” to “fucking constantly.” Smart phones and other hand-held digital devices allow us to fill every waking moment checking our email, texting our friends or tickling a tuxedo clad, robot synthesizer.

It turns out passing the time while we poop playing Sudoku isn’t all that good for us. An article recently posted at Kotaku points to a study by University of California researchers suggesting our brains require downtime. “Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” says university assistant professor, Loren Frank.

I feel exhausted almost all the time, and I’m willing to bet some of you reading this feel the same way. Scientists say when we constantly bombard our gray matter with new information to process it becomes fatigued.

Makes sense, intensely exercising all-day, every day would wear our bodies out; the brain is no different.

While I hate to admit it, I’m terribly addicted to Facebook, and social networking/media in general (not Farmville addicted, mind you, I can at least look down on those sacks of sadness). Between Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, my iPhone and RSS feeds I’m always checking something. By the end of the day I’m so mentally drained my head feels stuffed with cotton. Laying face down on the couch, I labor to reach my laptop on the coffee table in a pathetic effort to see if anyone has responded to my “Dick Cheney is an asshole, am I right?” status.

Sleep doesn’t help. I wake up bagged, like some post-apocalyptic social media zombie, fumbling my way to the computer to see what completely inconsequential updates await.

Kotaku’s article gave reason to my constant worn out state. I resolved to give my brain some breaks. Just me and my pal, Cerebral Cortex, alone with some time to defragment the massive influx of information I absorb every day. Important things like: the top ten people trending #yeg; which of my friends hate raisin cookies and who recently got a yeast infection (seriously, not a joke); and videos of my nephew laughing when his dad says “chop, chop!” (for the record, that was super cute)

Giving my thinker some time off, however, involves closing the laptop, putting down the iPhone and not killing dicks on Modern Warfare 2. In short, this mountain is nearly unscalable.

Determined, I’ve made a gutsy effort of dropping my various digital devices for a few moments of downtime. Five days in, the results are quite positive. Putting my brain on hiatus, even for fifteen minutes, leaves me feeling refreshed.

Something unexpected also happened; the breaks began to fuel my creativity. They allowed me to process disjointed ideas, plot out a direction, then formulate how I wanted to express them.

Is there a more pretentious way of explaining my new found creative approach? I don’t know. I’ll close my laptop for a few minutes and get back to you.

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Seriously?

I probably let dumb things on facebook bother me too much, but why are people bothering to click the “like” button for a instant messenger program? Nearly five million people? Come on, MSN is just a common tool. Like a wrench or a hammer, it has a very utilitarian, unexceptional purpose; communication.

But since people are morons, I’ve jumped on the rudimentary objects band wagon and created a page for people who like forks. Do you like forks?

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On Sunday I absolutely destroyed my ankle playing ball hockey. When I felt my joints reverberate in a very distinguishable crunch, I quickly hobbled back to the player’s bench certain the pain would be only temporary.

Nope. Very not temporary, in fact.

By the time I got home I was using the railing to slowly scale the stair case in a painfully long effort to reach the comfort of my living room couch. I grabbed a sandwich bag, chucked some ice into it, and applied it to my very swollen ankle.

Why am I tell you this? You don’t care about my whiny ankle pain. Well, hang on, I’m going somewhere with this, you impatient dick.

The next morning I awoke to the same sad, helpless trudge up to the living room; I now felt my basement bedroom annoyingly inconvenient. I stared at my coffee table for a second noticing the make-shift ice bag I left there last night, only now it was sitting in a large pool of water. Sandwich bags, as it turns out, are not waterproof.

After soaking the water up with a towel and admiring the soggy, peeling varnish left behind, I picked up my iPhone, which had also sat on the coffee table all night, to check for messages.

Curiously, my iPhone did not turn on; or rather it did turn on, but I couldn’t see anything. The LCD’s backlight was not doing any backlighting. Under a bright light I desperately leafed through the phone’s various settings but none managed to bring the screen back to life.

Fuck.

I could see in the tiny camera lens some condensation had formed, meaning the source of the problem was likely water damage. No company warranties water damage, meaning I could be horribly screwed.

I hopped on iChat the next day to talk to my friend Ryan, who manages an independent Apple store.

Me: “Help! My iPhone is broke! I can’t Twitter from the toilet anymore! People won’t know I’m on the toilet!”

Ryan: “Not seeing the negative here.”

Me: “Fine, just tell me what to do, okay?”

Apparently all iPhones have a white indicator that signals pink when water contact occurs. I hit a stroke of luck, the indicators were still white.

Ryan advised me to make an appointment with one of the official Apple retail outlets. It’s important to make an appointment, he said, otherwise I’d be standing around for a good while; which is kind of what happened anyway.

Apple’s service and support system is as glossy and simple as you would expect from an Apple product. Online appointment booking is quick and easy, allowing customers to pick the most convenient time to chat with an “Apple Genius.”

Genius. That’s a lot to live up to as an employee. I hate it when co-workers introduce me to customers saying something like “Gregg knows everything there is to know about camcorders,” cause I don’t. They are setting me up to fail.

Apple implies that every employee is a genius employee, who would want to have to live up to that every day?

When I got to the Genius Bar (where you can’t get a vodka-seven, so don’t ask) I could see my name up on the big, crisp displays behind it. This was impressive, I booked the appointment just hours ago, and there was my name, already automatically in the cue.

Okay, I’m on the board, so now what? Do I stand and wait for them to call my name? I don’t hear any names being called. Every employee seems to be fluttering about with no real purpose, should I wait for someone to ask if I need help?

Eventually a tall fellow in jeans and a baseball cap asked if he could help. I explained I was waiting for an appointment.

“Has anyone signed you in?” he asked.

Oh, okay, I need to be signed in. Great, this is progress.

Baseball Cap punched me into the computer and said “someone will be right with you.” Who? Who will be right with me? Everyone is just walking around aimlessly, how will they know who I am?

The whole system looks organized, but feels quite the opposite. There’s no clear indication where you should stand in line or who you should be talking to. All the counters are the same waist-high blond wood, none are marked with any label.

Somehow a dude I’ve never seen emerges from the back, walks straight up to me and asks “are you Gregg?”

Who am I to argue, I guess, the system works.

The tech was a really nice guy, so I felt bad lying through my teeth explaining the problem.

“Oh yeah, I just woke up and suddenly my phone wasn’t working, like it just decided it’s had enough with powering the backlight. Weird, right?” He told me that 90% of the time this issue was as a result of water damage.

“What?! Are people that reckless with their belongings? Who would be so ridiculously stupid as to leave their valuable iPhone overnight next to a sandwich bag full of water…for example? Whoever would do such a thing is likely not too bright; but they are probably still wickedly handsome and cool, I bet.”

I watched nervously as the tech inspected the water indicators, waiting to be karma’d into a pricy repair bill. Thankfully he could see no evidenced of water damage.

“Yeah, a friend told me about those, I checked them this morning” I said.

“Might as well be sure, right?” he replied. The best deception is the one that plays closest to the truth.

Thankfully my phone is functioning properly again and I can get back to dangerously texting my friends while driving. Thanks, Apple!

Update: I corrected a bunch of spelling and other mistakes. I’m a terrible proof-reader.

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When I first came up with the name “I Hate Humans” I thought it a momentary flash of unfathomable genius; I believe I registered the domain name that very night. The title itself doesn’t mean anything, other than an exaggerated metaphor for my scathing cynicism.

I saw I Hate Humans as an outlandish and inflammatory enough slogan that would undoubtedly catch the attention of the internets, thus sending my charming, witty prose high into the blogosphere!

I remember having a quick debate with myself over whether I should refer to my blog as I Hate Humans or as ihatehumans. Cool, hip things are always typed as a single word entirely in lowercase, and I was definitely cool and hip.

The conclusion I came to was that repeatedly referencing my site in one word would make it less accessible to searches and thus harder to find. My site was to have billions of readers. BILLIONS! They would need to be able to easily find my sweet new blog.

That proved to be a terrible mistake.

After launching the website my next step was to create a facebook (see?) fan page, or whatever it is they call them now; like pages? I invited all my friends to be fans – about half those ingrates accepted – and I was quickly on my way to blog super-stardom!

I checked that fan page religiously, eager to see if my fans had grown. When I got my first fans who I did not know personally I was ecstatic. Surely this meant my writing was impossibly funny and people around the globe were enjoying its steady feed of hilarity.

Suddenly the number of fans exploded. I quickly reached 100 then 200 people but curiously none were commenting on any articles.

Then idiotic messages like this began to appear on the wall:

Slowly, I began to realize that, in fact, no one was reading my site. My “fans” were just a collection of social network junkies who thought “I Hate Humans? I hate humans too, ayuk-yuk!” The page became another “hilarious” group like “justin bieber sucks” or “your so beautiful.. LOL jk go back under your bridge you troll” (no, seriously, that’s a page, it has over 100,000 fans).

As the number of fans ballooned so too did the idiocy of the messages.

This guy may have some kind of transformational fetish, but at least his spelling is mostly correct, even if his grammar is not. The rest of the messages are an incoherent mess of atrocious misspellings and non-existent punctuation.

Frankly, I’m shocked these people have the spacial awareness to find the computer’s power button, much less typing big five or even six letter words. I like to imagine Mr. Redden mashing his meaty hands against the keyboard in a vain attempt to convey his ideas about fire and sharpened rocks.

When the walls posts got creepy, I started to lose heart.

I stopped writing. My motivation was lost; my passion crushed under a heavy pile of vacuous, cretinous babble. I resolved to change the name of my blog and delete the fan page, but not before writing a liberating post chronicling the harsh stupidity existing on my fan page.

And here we are.

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