SAN BRUNO, CA (GlossyNews) — YouTube, the popular video networking site, was unavailable today due to technical difficulties. The site, which attracts millions of users from across the globe, was down for one hour while technicians attempted to rectify the problem. Bored, unemployed people everywhere awoke to the outage, and panicked.
“They were left to their own devices in attempting to fill the first few hours of their day,” said Stan Rossmore, head of the International Institute Of Boredom. “The first few hours of a bored person’s day are considered by many to be the most difficult. Without YouTube, they were forced to look at their life introspectively; many were unprepared for the reality.”
Twenty-two-year-old Robert Smithton of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, attempted to outline the chain of events that led to his own personal panic. “I poured my cereal and sat down at my computer, like I do every morning. I’d heard about this video with a chicken and a goldfish staring at each other, and I was excited to watch it. At first I thought it was my computer, so I restarted — which took about ten minutes because I rarely restart my computer — then, I tried YouTube again. Nothing, just a blank screen. I kept refreshing my browser, just kept clicking re-load, but this only wasted about another twenty minutes. It was then that I started to panic.”
“YouTube’s ability to inject a false sense of accomplishment into a bored person’s day is very powerful and often overlooked,” said Rossmore. “You take this feeling of accomplishment away and all that’s left is a crushing sense of one’s own inadequacy. This, I’m afraid, is what happened this morning.”
Smithton added, “I looked outside at the trees, the blue sky. I wasn’t prepared for it — the crying, the whole thing. I called my parents, and after convincing them that I wasn’t asking for money, my mother’s personal secretary helped talk me down. It was a close one, I’m not gonna lie.”
Global panic subsided and many returned to their morning routines as YouTube’s service gradually resumed around 9:00 a.m. EDT.
Mr. Smithton talked of the difficult minutes before hearing the news. “I ended up walking around the lobby of my high-rise Brooklyn apartment building in my bathrobe. That was embarrassing, let me tell you. It was the first time I’d been outside in days. As soon as Cliff, my doorman, let me know YouTube was back on line, I raced upstairs and watched that chicken goldfish video. It was way funnier than I thought it was going to be. It was broken up into 15 ten-minute segments, so yeah, you do the math. It was a pretty good morning. I got a lot done.”