Meanwhile, in the real world...

There are some fascinating people out there, who are more than happy to talk about themselves, look familiar, but don’t actually exist.

“Hi! I’m Gina. I’m 46, have two teenage daughters, I’m an Office Manager for a law firm, I read The Guardian and interior design magazines, I like keeping fit and supporting charities, and I spend time on Twitter and Facebook. I live in the North West and I would say the websites I visit most are BBC News and anything with kittens covered in salami and wearing lederhosen. Why? Because I’m not real, dummy!”

If you work for an organisation that sells something, has a website, or generally feels it needs to understand more about their customers’ “experience”, you may well have met Gina, or someone like her.

She might have looked like your burly marketing guy, or the barely-out-of-her teens social media whizzkid, but that’s only because they’ve been talked into making her up, then had to go through the excruciatingly embarrassing process of ‘being’ their creation so that you and your colleagues can discuss how best to communicate with them and fulfil their needs.

If the sight of Big Dave from Finance pretending to be a teenage girl called Kaz isn’t sufficiently awkward to make you wish for an immediate meteor strike, pinning your hopes on him getting inside the mind of his creation sufficiently to salvage some scrap of usefulness from the whole ghastly experience may be a request too big for the universe to deliver. And before coffee and biscuits, too.

You’re more likely to get “I like reading magazines and looking at my phone and hanging out with my friends.” than “I’m an Instagram-native and rock my own YouTube channel with 10,000 followers and I loooove a good selfie.” (and I’m probably seriously wrong about that too, for all the same reasons).

And that’s the problem. If we were all able to know exactly what any other person, of any age or gender, liked, thought, read, did or wanted to find on your website, then the world would function much more smoothly, and we’d all be e-commerce millionaires.

We may well have sorted world peace too. Imagine it – if we all knew what someone else desired, and could deliver it for them when, where and how they wanted it. Wouldn’t that be... well, kind of dull, actually.

Everything is easy to locate? Where’s the thrill in finding something exciting by chance? No new music needed – we already know what people like. We’d be stuck in a world of stagnation. What would be the point of risking coming up with something entirely innovative, when our customers already know what they need? No iPhones then – I already have a great camera, MP3 player, phone, video camera and a diary.

Maybe it’s best we still need to ask Kaz. Perhaps we should go outside and find out what she thinks. Big Dave doing the voice as well is too freaky.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 5th of February 2016. It's getting on for three weeks now since they updated the 'Opinion' page on their website, but just in case you feel like hanging around to see if any columns ever show up again, head here.

This post sprung forth after a tricky bout of roleplay at work on the day of writing. I'm naturally rather introverted, so this kind of thing is a full-blown horror-show for me, and the increasing irritation at having to pretend to know what my made-up person might think when they arrived on our website left me feeling particularly irritated by column-penning time.

Happily, rather than just vent about it, I was able to slightly justify why I think it's ineffective. And I felt better afterwards.

Another strange round of activity for this blog - after a couple of quiet months following the second biggest number of hits ever, just one week of February has majorly topped the Dec & Jan totals, and if it were to continue at the same pace would comfortably be the biggest month ever. And I still have no idea why, or how come the traffic is mostly American. Baffling, but nice...

( Temporary suspension of the CD A-Z to listen to a new arrival, a-ha's latest, "Cast In Steel". Great so far...)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Unstable Stables: Throw away the key

It’s comforting to know that there is one less threat to the people of Cumbria this week, following the conviction of white supremacist, Ethan Stables. The 20 year old from Barrow had planned to attack the town’s New Empire pub in June 2017, in the midst of a gay pride event. Despite social media posts saying he was “going to war” and planning to “slaughter”, online searches about how to make bombs and chemical poisons, and expressing hatred of Muslims, Jews and gay people, he claimed his online comments were merely to impress far-right friends. Fortunately, following Facebook posts about his intentions, the police were tipped off and armed officers intercepted him as he headed towards the pub. His aim was to kill anyone he found, with a machete. In a bizarre slip-up, Stables had erroneously added an innocent woman to his neo-Nazi Facebook group. When he vented his outrage at the Furness LGBT support group’s event, the shocked woman contacted the authorities. He’ll have ple...

Is it foggy? No.

When I get put in charge (which is bound to happen soon), I'm going to introduce a whole raft of new laws, for I shall be a just and fair ruler. I'm quite liking the title of 'Most Marvellous Emperor Of Sensible Regulations And Bountiful Lovingness Not To Mention Exceedingly Handsome', but it might be a bit long. On that basis, I'll settle for the more informal 'He Who Is Smashing' from my loyal subjects. Anyway, I digress. I do that sometimes - had you noticed? Here, then, is the first law that will introduced: grumpyf1 law No.1 - Turn your fog lights off, you complete git. Don't get me wrong; If it genuinely is foggy, fog lights are quite handy. The reason for introduction of this law is because 96% of the time (based on my own in-depth research) it isn't foggy when some utter cockwomble blinds you. This has always been a bit of a problem but in the last couple of years it seems to have escalated out of control, possibly because of the...

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