Everything old is new again

Plenty of Fish was down for several hours yesterday and oh the great hue and cry !!!!
Facebook and Twitter were alive with questions about how people were going to get through their working day. Someone actually claimed to have Markus on the phone. Hands were being wrung, OkCupid was flooded with new members.
We are addicted you see. Few are actually on POF to find a relationship. It is a free site.......let's face it....it's a chat room !!
Remember the chat rooms of the 1990's?  Everyone had their online boyfriend/girlfriend. Marriages were ruined. Sex became something that only happened in "private rooms"....it all came down to talking about it rather than actually doing it. Anyone who was glib of tongue and familiar with basic anatomy could reign and conquer. We can thank this phenomenon for the vastly overused word "chat". I mean....come on, who ever used the word "chat" prior to the influx of chat rooms ? Until then it was something old ladies did at bingo games.
There we learned to talk in acronyms, draw pictures with punctuation marks and streamline our work day to allow endless hours of virtual time wasting.
We could be anyone we wanted to be. The erudite Belgian chef was most likely Murry the plumber from Poughkeepsie sitting naked in his attic with a cold Schlitz and a bag of pork rinds.
Should the site crash however, people the world over who are entitled to vote and drive cars would regress into sniveling infants who had lost their favorite binkie.
It was an addiction of sorts, a 24/7/360 party we could show up at in a ratty bathrobe and slippers. No one ever had to surrender their car keys and conga lines around the buffet table were, thankfully, never an interruption.

A free dating site seems to offer this same addictive alternative to actually leaving the house. The party is always well attended, and no one has to cough up $8 for a Mojito.
Private "rooms" may not be available but.....isn't that what texting is for ?
Expecting to actually date is perhaps a bit like waiting for Murry to put on some pants, wipe the grease of his fingers and take you to Harvey's with a coupon. It could happen I suppose........but he would have to leave the party.