A crowd of none.

There's always that feeling that whatever I do, someone has already been there, done that, got the tee-shirt, etc. The scope for being original seems to diminish daily. But then, just as I had written off breaking new ground, the unexpected pops up exactly where you were not expecting it. It happened to me this week...

Not an auspicious start: the new water cooler arrived at work. The old one had given its all for some years, but the fickle opinion of the office-denizens had been measured, and it said: 'Change!' So it was out with the old and in with the new. Which is when we discovered that an old friend can be familiar, worn-in, comfy, accepted, and more. In stark contrast, our new watery-dispersery-thingy was, well, not to put too fine a point on it: 'challenged in the attractiveness department'. Actually, it was more like something robotic from the 1950s, a sort of wet non-metallic blanket that oozed 'lack of late 2000s' style. It was, in a word: ugly.

Now these days, any pejorative or politically incorrect word can be a distinct advantage in certain quarters, and so I Googled 'ugly water coolers' in the sure and certain knowledge that there would be a whole host of web-pages bemoaning the passing of water coolers that had missed out on the cover of <insert suitable magazine title here> by just a hair's breadth, that there would be whole web-sites, fora and forums teeming with people discussing just how ugly it was possble to make a water cooler.

But there weren't any. Google drew a blank. You could hear the wind whistling through the air, and the tumbleweed scudding across the screen. Nothing. A crowd of none.

Until now, that is. The mere act of revealing in a blog that there are not hordes of angry orclets, orclings, orclers, orcifiers, uberorcs, orcles, miniorcs and otherorcs all sharing opinions on 'The Ugliness of the Cold and Hot Dispensing Water Cooler/Hotter' means that there is now something for Google to find next time, and you are reading it. If you are really suspiciously and amazingly lucky, then you are reading this before Google finds this, in which case, you have found it before it has been found!

So there you go. I found, fleetingly, something upon which Google had not cast its all-unseeing eye. And I promptly destroyed that which I had found, without malice aforethought, and without realising that I had been original. And in the act of being original, had removed the means for anyone else to be original in the same way. Gone. Forever. And you were here just as they started clearing away afterwards... (And I've used 'and' as the start of a sentence way too many times!)