OK, so I’m a bit of an online junkie. If I’m at home, I’m either at my computer or I’ve reluctantly given in to the need to sleep or take care of other bodily needs. I used to be like this with TV: Ten years ago I had 3 VCR’s wired in series and never quite understood the question “What did you watch last night?” just as whoever asked it didn’t really understand when I responded with “Errr…everything.”

So now I’m online at almost all hours and that means that I typically have 12-15 browser windows open and probably have 7-8 incoming avenues for communication available at any time. Or 9-10 if you include my phone, which generally gets forgotten when I’m at home and fixated on the 22” cantilevered monitor on that swings out over my giant buttoned-back recliner (think Matrix meets an old school gents club, with the cleaning skills of a frat house membership).

At any given time (and that includes when I’m not here, much to the consternation of friends) I’ll be logged into AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, office email, Yahoo! email, Facebook and Facebook IM, myspace and myspace IM (which only one person I know uses, but he uses it a lot), and a couple of dating sites (let’s not go there this time – that’s a whole different story, for a different day and a different ratings standard). This of course results in assorted problems like arranging the real estate on the screen so that messages don’t interrupt the latest bathroom cover track playing on youtube, remembering bizarrely phrased and vowel-free screennames of somebody I chatted with once several weeks earlier while the Ambien was kicking in, and avoiding replying to the wrong person (damn you pop-up windows!) or while inadvertently still in caps lock (no, I was working on something else, I’m not mad – and it’s not always about you).

But it also means that I’m inundated by a ridiculous assortment of chimes and beeps. Everything has its own sound and there’s no apparent logic to any of it. And not just the direct sounds, like an incoming message on myspace IM, but also the secondary alerts like Yahoo! Messenger making sure that I know that I have an incoming email in my Yahoo! inbox pointing out that somebody (probably the vaguely remembered at best, Ambien fueled chat participant) just left a new and inscrutable comment on my myspace profile.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining – I wouldn’t want to miss these incoming nuggets of personal updatery, it’s just that I’m chime-illiterate or web-tone deaf or something. My monitor squeals at me (I’m not really the separate speakers type) and I have to visually scan the screen, in the absence of a (damn!) pop-up, for a tab or a minimized window on a toolbar somewhere might be flashing. Hoping that it isn’t just some tiny message in the corner that’s going to disappear again before I can even refocus my attention from the latest insights from the worlds of inhabitat.com or Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia or the urban dictionary (seriously, how did I survive before the interwebs?). Indeed, a friend just sent me three lines of text (via one of the undisclosed dating sites) and I was so deep in my sweet and sour pork Panda Feast revelry that for a moment I thought my tire pressure must be low or perhaps my microwave was irritated by more than a minute of inactivity. (Thank you flashing tab for saving me yet again.)

This tonal disorientation extends to other settings. I am not, for the most part, a competent user of specifically designated ringtones. Even before “my cell” was my phone and not just a night’s accommodation after an evening of too-drunken revelry (or when wireless was a classier way to refer to a radio), I was confused by ringtones. In grad school at Clemson, “The Harvard of the South!” (which always made me wonder if you could buy “The Clemson of the North!” shirts in Cambridge), I never figured out the difference between off-campus calls and on-campus calls. This was, apparently, an innate skill for everybody around me but persistently eluded me for three years.

I now miss text messages completely because I have the even more confusing array of sounds on my Storm (The World’s First Touchscreen Blackberry! – I think it’s in my contract that I have to type that) disabled. And don’t get me started about the significance of differently shaped envelope icons!

And none of this is made any better by how directionally challenged I am by some sounds. Not only will I turn the wrong way, against the rotation of the swiveling heads in a crowded room, but I expect a speeding ticket when a fire truck runs a light on a nearby cross street (which may of course have as much to do with the likelihood that I’m speeding as my aural deficiencies). And, yes, I’m the guy who attempts to answer my phone when yours rings, even though mine doesn’t play Single Ladies and you’re riding in the fire truck.

Note: Not only have I been barraged by assorted sounds while I type this, even at 2am, but I just encountered my first AIM avatar that actually laughs creepily when the user types “lol” – LOL.

All of which leads me to the next obvious questions: Why would I want Twitter, what does it sound like, and will it annoy me while I’m eating the rest of my Panda Feast?