There really is some insane stuff on the internet. I mean, yes, you have to look for it, but it’s there – lurking just below the respectable surface, waiting for the right moment to leap out and melt your mind. This evening, for example, I – for reasons which I shall explain at no later date – googled the phrase “hog hog”. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but it certainly wasn’t a page entitled “Energy Hog”, the tag line of which was that I should “complete all five games to become an official Hog buster”.
Well, frankly, this was irresistible. For some years now, I’ve been an unofficial Hog buster, and here was a chance to take it to the next level and stop having to bust hogs clandestinely, but to be allowed to do it in public. So I clicked on the link and was greeted to a brief piece of animation in which two people march into view. The woman is all right – almost attractive, even, if you’re sad, lonely and desperate – but the man is short and squat, so I thought he was a hog. I almost busted him there and then, before I noticed his little speech bubble. This explained that he was Inspector Hector and the woman was Inspector Irene, and that they were going to help me to become an official Energy Hog Buster.
I now noted the addition of the word “energy”. I don’t bust Energy Hogs. I bust normal hogs. Perhaps this website wasn’t going to be for me after all. But on the other hand, it still claimed to be official, so I continued. As can be seen in the below picture, Inspector Irene explained that there’s a lot to be learned about hog bustin’, and suggested that we get started at once!
There then followed some seriously scary noises, sounding as though I were entering a top secret nuclear bunker, with clanking and everything. I didn’t like it. But then Inspector Hector reappeared and invited me to type in my name so they’d know what to put on my Official Hog Busting Licence later, I presume. I was also invited to “choose your face”, which did rather take me by surprise. I did this and was rewarded with more horrible noises, then an info page explaining that “Energy Hogs are nasty critters that hide all over your home and pig out on wasted energy.”
I was beginning to suspect that these were metaphorical hogs, not real ones, which is a shame, because I really wanted to become professionally qualified to kick some hog ass. But never mind, at least I would learn about how to save a bit of money on my energy bills (which are, frankly, extortionate, probably because I spend so much time online typing “hog hog” into Google). But this hope was denied me by the very next sentence – “To outsmart the Energy Hogs, you have to beat those nasty oinkers at their own game” – which basically means that you have to waste more energy than the Energy Hogs in order to defeat them, and is thus not perhaps the best idea.
I was informed that there are five games to play in order to complete my training and get my official Energy Hog Buster certification. I couldn’t wait. I clicked the red button and was taken to a bird’s eye map of a house. It’s a pretty normal house, except that a) it doesn’t appear to have any doors, either between rooms or to allow entry and egress from the house, and b) the attic is a little cupboard in the corner of the bedroom. Anyway, I had to choose which room to go to in order to challenge a certain type of energy hog.
The bathroom was the first place I went. Inspector Irene appeared and explained that Energy Hogs love to waste hot water, and thus taking shorter showers would help to defeat the Energy Hogs. I was then taken to the “game”, which was entitled “Whack-a-Hog”, and the object of which was to hit 20 Energy Hogs on the head within a time limit. Then I was presented with this ridiculous vaguely pig-like creature, which kept sticking its head up over the edge of the bath, only for me to hit it with the shower brush to the accompaniment of a comedy sound effect.
The other games were equally dull – in the kitchen, there was a game of pairs, justified under the rather unlikely scenario that this family had 18 fridges in the kitchen, each of which only contained one item, and it would somehow save energy if I managed to match up the pairs of fridges that had the same food inside them. Much better, I felt, to amalgamate all the food into one fridge and chuck out the other 17. But this wasn’t mentioned as a possibility, and since Inspectors Hector and Irene have clearly been doing this a lot longer than I have, I bow to their superior knowledge.
The attic game involved using rolls of insulation to knock over a terrifying parade of pigs that were advancing unrelentingly towards me; the living room game gave me control of a caulk gun so that I could seal the windows more securely and stop the porkers getting in, and the bedroom game was a maze featuring a robot who had to navigate through the darkness to turn ten lights on. I felt that turning ten lights on in one bedroom was a trifle excessive, and possibly even could be defined as hogging energy, but again, Inspectors Hector and Irene told me to do it, so I did.
After completing all these games, I was awarded the below certificate:
I am immensely proud of it and have it up on my bedroom wall.
The fun didn’t stop there, of course. There’s a bonus game called “Hog and Seek”, which basically involves some nut of a boy running all over his house, shutting windows and doors and turning computers and TVs off and generally being a self-righteous obsessive-compulsive tosser. I was also vaguely tempted by the “adult” section of the website, which I thought might feature excessively violent hog busting games, or at least some X-rated pictures of Inspector Irene, but it turned out to be rather disappointing in both respects.
I did, however, click on “Who is Hog?” and found that the answer is this:
Even without the fact that when you scroll your mouse over any of these pictures, they make a stupid oinking noise, this rogue’s gallery will, I think, haunt my dreams for ever. Especially Hal Hogg, who looks like cruel caricatures my classmates used to draw of me. But perhaps the less said about that, the better.