Nosing around the internet...
WANT to know how to best squeeze an underarm zit or boil? Change the front wheel nuts on a 1948 vintage Scammel tank transporter? Or how about cleansing your conservatory of negativity using burning sage, bells and chanting?
It’s simple if you just go on the internet. Who would have thought that all those awkward questions that you were sure never had answers, were actually only a swipe or a click away from a solution!
It blows me away that any human activity, no matter how obscure, daft or just plain weird, will have somebody providing a short video of ‘how it’s done.’
This week I went to the docs for some nasal spray aye that’s how rock’n’roll my life is these days!
Indeed, you know there’s been a sea change in your life when the place you bump into old school mates is the doctor’s waiting room instead of Julie’s or the Tuxedo Princess.
Anyway, I’m no ear, nose and throat specialist, but I thought pointing a nozzle up your hooter and letting fly with some spray was about as straightforward as you can get.
Wrong! As I prepared to take my medication nasally, I decided to have a giggle; for inspiration I mentally chose to emulate Al Pacino’s character, the gangster Tony Montana in the movie Scarface. I visualised him as he appeared in the final climactic scenes of the movie, whereupon he does some interesting and industrialised snorting techniques of his own.
What’s good enough for Al was good enough for me; for authenticity, as I pulled the spray bottle out of Its little box, I even exclaimed “Say hello to my little friend!”
At that moment of middleaged blokie immaturity, however, my beloved had the good sense to intervene.
Like most carers of middleaged daft lads, my beloved is a black belt at looking up stuff online, so she suggested that instead of acting out my eighties Hollywood gangster fantasies, I should look up ‘How to apply a nasal spray.’
Givowwer! How dense do you you have to be to look something like that? Surely such videos are aimed at the same people for whom the ‘remove before driving’ warnings are printed on those car windscreen covers you use on hot days?
Nevertheless, after a brief flurry of hadaways, givowwers and getaways, I relented and began my journey into nasal spray enlightenment.
After I typed in ‘ how to use nasal spray’ up jumped a bevy of YouTube clips - far more then I dared imagine.
It was mind boggling. All these people had taken time out from their seemingly busy days to get somebody to film them shoving a plastic bottle up their schnozzle. Who to choose? I discounted the punters who weren’t wearing white lab-type ‘doctor’ coats and who lacked a medical looking backdrop.
If I’m going to fall for this advice malarkey, I’m certainly not consulting a fat bloke in a onesie in a pokeylooking room that would shame a TV hoarder homes documentary.
I settled on this typical Yank game show host sort of guy; an orange-tanned, pearl-white smiling yet pukka looking American specialist who had the biggest number of hits.
Numbers are important in this game – it’s the old human tendency to go with the crowd – nobody in their right mind would plump for the aforementioned ‘onesie man’ in his bedroom with his 27 hits, when you can go to ‘Dr Luuurve’ with his 320,000 video views.
In a patronising tone, as if speaking to a hungover Premier League footballer, he explained how to bow your head, pull your nostril to one side to avoid splashing the septum, whilst aiming a burst on an angle roughly in line with your earlobe.
I was mesmerised! How could I have even considered snorting my meds without this genius’s advice?
It’s gone too far the other way now; I won’t even do me laces up without looking it up on YouTube. Indeed, I’m currently searching for video on how to stop obsessively searching for advice online...