I love the internet. I really do. It is a constant source of memes, monkeys, pie and keetooms, as well as a useful receptacle into which excess time can be thrown. But it seems to be the consensus that the internet is responsible for this ‘global economy’ thing, and I am officially unimpressed.

My inbox is full…full to the point of annoying ‘You can’t send e-mail messages, thus accomplishing tasks and shifting responsibility, until you sort through all this crap and delete some powerpoint presentations people have sent to you to print!’ messages from Outlook…and a significant portion of it is from Europe.

Now, the language barrier here is far less of a problem than it was the last time I worked on an Asian project, but for some reason the ‘getting anything bloody accomplished’ barrier is far, far higher. We send you form. You fill in form. You send me form and I slavishly type your information into spreadsheet. Is simple! But no.

We have Swedes who don’t fill in forms, or think that ‘credit card info’ means absolutely everything about your credit card, down to its color and where it goes in your wallet, that is NOT the number. We have Italians who write convoluted messages which sound like they’re asking for special steps to be taken, and turn out to mean that they don’t need anything, including a hotel room. We have Greeks who need hotel confirmation numbers for their embassy (really?) and people from Dubai who send back a carefully uncompleted form. I’m serious, people. Stop. The deadline was last week. You were late last week. And every time I write you an e-mail, it takes 24 hours to get a response through the haze of timezones. I can’t help you, and you’re not helping me.

Let’s break up the global economy, people. It’s not working. We gave it a go and it just isn’t so. Until we all speak Esperanto and I go to work at 3 pm and stay til 9 (sorry, that’s 15.00 and 21.00 to you!) I think we should take a break. I’ll stay right here and you stay way over there, and if we have to use the internet, let’s use it for keetooms and pie.