If there is one thing we are always striving for in this world, it’s new ways to communicate. From the telephone, to the beeper to the Internet, the more we say, the more ways we need to say it. I have used every type of communication device you can think of and never had a problem, but if there is one type of communication device that will boggle my mind for the rest of my existence – it’s the chat room.

Maybe I’m dumb, maybe I’m old – or maybe I’m stupid – but I can’t figure out chat rooms to save my life. Put it this way, if I was stranded on a desert island and the only way I could communicate with civilization was through a chat room – I’d die, alone and starving.

For as long as I have been online, I have tried to master the art of the chat room, and been unsuccessful. I have signed on to hundreds of chat rooms and tried to communicate with my fellow web surfers on dozens of occasions – and gotten nowhere. Yet, every time I see a friend online, they are chatting with hundreds of people successfully. So what the hell am I doing wrong?

I did what anyone else would have done. I did a search for South Park Chat Rooms and found fifteen. I logged into each chat room to try and talk to someone – anyone – but wound up talking only to myself and then switching to another chat room only to do this fifteen times until I gave up and began to write this.

Don’t get me wrong, the rooms were full, but everyone was speaking in a language that I could not understand even with the help of a universal translator.

Let me give you an example: I enter the room and say, “hello everyone!” and all I get back is, “lol shaking goth’s hand” – what does that mean? This happened over and over again. No matter where I went I was met with gibberish phrases and sayings that I could not understand, proving that for me – chat rooms have no vacancy.

I guess I’ll stick to the telephone.