Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Sign of the apocalypse no. 33

Google has failed, y'all.

I feel almost as lost as when I discovered Target doesn't carry lint traps. Not online either. You can't even search "lint trap" because when you do the internet gnomes turn it into plain "lint," like you never typed the word "trap" in the first place, but YOU DID DAMN IT.

Look at the top where the tabs are ... LINT TRAP. Lint. TRAP.

Anyway, when preschool started two years ago I wrote a poem outlining my feelings about it. With kindergarten starting tomorrow I'm having many of those same feelings, only now they are 80% stronger and accompanied by panic attacks. So today I turned to Google to help me sort this out.

I was in search of an image that would communicate my feelings in a succinct way, because I felt like expressing those feelings but did not wish to bore people who've heard the exact same thing from approximately 58 of their other Facebook friends, and, in fact, from me two years ago.

You go to Google for anything - everything - and expect it to display an array of results that will surely encompass the very item you're looking for. A recipe for chicken noodle soup, famous people named Beyonce, what to do when mice fight, and so on. But Google straight up failed me on "first day of kindergarten."

To be fair, the web search did come up with all the appropriate terms and phrases:
"what to plan"
"how to organize"
"celebrate"
"cry"
"exciting"
"happy dance"
"collapse"
"survival"

But the image search is pretty much just a bunch of adorable graphics.

The only feeling this conjures is inadequacy.

Even if you refine the search with the "mom" button, the results HEAVILY favor the celebratory mother who is occasionally fist-pumping, often jumping for joy, and always white (but that's another matter). There's a couple of cryers. Nothing that evokes the actual range of emotions at play in real life.

So I went ahead and Googled some other phrases and finally landed on "crazy happy scared," which yielded some really irrelevant shit but also this:






Source
So there you have it.