Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can’t even figure out what’s wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:

Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes...

But today, I see the same mug in an advertisement for some random Minnesota state college:

And at an Irish hosting service:

And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody’s full of shit. Oh, I guess it’s effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it’s cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?

You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you’ve ever shopped for web hosting, you’ll notice, after a few visits to the providers’ pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there’s always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.

It’s a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.