Barring Google
It is almost a rite of passage to be barred from a pub in Ireland.
Naturally this doesn't apply for under eighteens as it makes things too easy for the barkeep.
I lost my cherry soon after my eighteenth. If I remember correctly, it was because my hair was too long and the barman didn't like the look of me. Fair enough. I had passed the rite with flying colours.
Since then I have been barred from several pubs for various reasons, from being rowdy to bringing in an under eighteen girlfriend [she was actually 21 at the time]. My most memorable was for getting revenge on a rude barman by lining up three upside down pints on the bar counter which is a great trick. I respected all those barrings. They had their reasons, some were deserved and some weren't but they all had one thing in common – they all gave a reason.
So last weekend, Google decided to bar me from their linking yoke to Twitter. As far as I am concerned there was nothing extraordinary about the thing I was posting – no porn, no more than the usual outpouring of fucks [well, I was annoyed at the time], no inciting to violence or in fact anything out of the ordinary. Yet they decided to bar me.
Not only did they bar me, but they replaced every single link in my Twitter thingy in the past to point to their fucking site, giving their terms and conditions. It's like a judge showing the condemned man a book of law and telling him that's why he's being hanged. It's like being picked up by the scruff of the neck in a pub and being thrown out without a single word of explanation.
Stranger still, it wasn't just me. Apparently Michael Siegel had been barred too.
Now I see the links have been restored, again without a word of explanation. No apologies, no reasons, no nothing. No offers of compensation for loss of business or destroyed reputation. They didn't have the balls to tell me when they were cutting the links and they didn't have the guts to tell me when things were restored.
Unfortunately I haven't discovered a way to get at them with the upside down pint trick, though I would dearly love to.
I have done the next best thing.
I have barred them.
You know what I say about Google? Fuck ’em 😛
Then again, at least their bots aren’t quite so overzealous as the BaiduSpiders and all those East-European script-kiddy (“scriddy”) I’ve mentioned before.
Google had three good innovations. There was the search of course, their Feed Reader and Analytics.
Then their search became a scraper for personal information so I dumped that in favour of IXQuick
They scrapped their Reader for no reason whatsoever so now I used Feedly.
I have never used Chrome and never will.
The ony thing of theirs that I willingly still use is Analytics.
The only reason I still use that is that it's the only yoke that has been running on this site since the start, so it's handy for historical comparisons.
as you should! (I’d love to learn the successful upside down pint trick, when ever I tried the glass mysteriously is emptied before I can turn it over to do the trick)
Beer is grand for the trick as it makes a nice sticky mess when it goes all over the place, but water is nearly as effective [that's what I used]. For the trick to be really spectacular, chose a table or bar that has some kind of lip on the edge to stop the barman form sliding the pints off.
I once got banned from the disco for piddling in the corner. In mitigation, I was stupid, young and drunk.
If you're going to get banned, do it in style.