THAT'S MEN:If something happens to make you say "fmylife", you can share your sorrow with the world on a dedicated website, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN.
WHO SAYS men can’t multitask? I have been reading up on complaints by women about men who do more than one thing at a time, even during sex.
One woman reports that during a heated, kinky phone conversation with her boyfriend the line suddenly went silent. She waited. Then she heard typing. He was checking his e-mail.
There’s the guy who interrupted sex with his girlfriend to go to the kitchen to bake chocolate chip cookies. “However, he told me we could still continue while the oven preheated.”
This information is all the product of many hours of research on www.fmylife.com, one of those websites that makes the whole internet thing worthwhile.
If something happens to make you go “fmylife”, then you can share your sorrow with the world via this website.
Reading it helps you figure out what works and what doesn’t. For instance, next time Mister Chocolate Chip is planning to have sex with his girlfriend, he’ll get her to stop off at the store and buy a bag of cookies on the way. No interruptions.
Similarly, the guy who, in the middle of sex with his wife, whispered, “We are so gonna make pizza after this!” might learn to shut up and order a takeaway.
It’s not all about sex. In the section on the wonderful world of work, one correspondent reports that: “Today, my boss asked me to call his new phone to make sure it was working. When his phone didn’t ring, he looked at my phone to confirm I called him. My boss then saw that I’d entered him into my phonebook as ‘douche bag’.”
I empathise with the guy who put in a request to change his shift only to find he had been fired a week earlier. Apparently his contribution to the enterprise was such that nobody noticed he had been coming in.
I empathise because I once had a newspaper column in a very venerable newspaper. One week the sub-editors just simply forgot to put it in and nobody noticed, not my “readers”, not my colleagues, not the editor who had dreamt up the whole idea in the first place. So a few weeks later I just stopped writing it. To this day, nobody has asked where it is.
And here is a mistake to avoid even in today’s property market: “Today, my fiance and I toured our dream home. I was so excited about it that I posted all kinds of pictures of it on Facebook. My boss’s daughter just called and said she loved my pictures so much she made an offer on the house. We were one week away from making an offer.”
Life is full of hidden traps and this website will help you steer clear of them. One guy arranged for his new girlfriend to be at the other end of a webcam so he could show her off to his entire family. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell her his family would be watching and she thought she would give him a nice surprise by taking all her clothes off. Don’t let it happen to you.
And spare a thought for a gal called Lacey, who informs the world that: “Today, I called my boyfriend and when he answered, I said the dirtiest thing I could think of to him on the phone. After a long silence, I heard, ‘Lacey? Is that you?’ I accidentally called my dad.”
Dads are good advisers, though. One guy reported: “Today, my father pulled me aside right before heading off to my girlfriend’s house. He said ‘Next time you have sex, don’t leave the tied up condom in its wrapper inside your shorts pocket, otherwise your mother might find it again as she’s folding laundry.’”
And, parents, what do you think of this: “Today, I turned 23. I had asked my mom for some things to decorate my new place. As I opened the box to reveal my gift, a mirror was inside. I liked the mirror. I did not like the note attached that said ‘Look in the mirror to see who is now 100 per cent financially responsible for themselves.’” I thought so.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Thats Men, the best of the That's Men column from The Irish Times, is published by Veritas