Surfing On Caffeine

They just sit there, hour after hour, staring at the screen in front of them, fingers sporadically tapping, tap-tap-tapping on the keyboards. Next to their machines, cups of something sit - perhaps a soy chai latte?

Enter the curious subculture of hotspot cafes. Geeks like me have finally been persuaded to abandon our insular lifestyle of surfing the net in our bachelor pads, alone with our generic crackers and home-made mugs of milo. Instead, we now brave a world of surfing the internet out in public, occasionally alone still, but with upgrades to imported chips and franchised frappucino. Geeks will now be more social, perhaps even chatting with some cute teenage girl named sweepea90, blissfully unaware that sweepea90's actually that geriatric man sitting two tables away.

OK, I admit I actually haven't quite taken to this brave new world yet. Back in the days when my PC was constrained to sitting on a desk, I pretty much liked the idea of sitting in a nice cafe all by myself, just reading a book. But in truth, I've only done that a couple of times. It would have been different if I was in Melbourne where the neighbourhood I lived in had great little cafes just a block away that served cheap lattes. Here in the valley, going to a decent cafe would mean driving half an hour through horrendous traffic. And so expensive to have a drink there some more!

So I guess my notebook won't be going out all that often, the poor thing. But at least it's had it's first outing the other day when I was hanging out with Jon. Of course, prim and proper people like us don't surf porn sites (at least not in public). No, we were expanding our knowledge and wisdom by catching up on international current events.

Ah, mi petit notebook. Hope you enjoyed that taste of fresh air. It'll be a while before you get it again. A long while.