The Internet is like New York, a city that never sleeps, except for the fact that it is not actually a city. The Web's ‘anytime' nature is a boon for people who want to talk to someone at 4 am such as anyone who is doing shift work. Before the Internet, if you finished work at 4 am, the only people awake were other shift workers such as your co-workers. The only people you could unwind with after work were the co-workers you probably wanted to get away from. Your only company were the people you were most likely to want to complain about to some understanding third party.

Thanks to the Internet shift workers can go into a chat room at any time and talk to people about their day. Some of these people will be in other time zones where everyone has just finished work and won't think twice about anyone who has just gotten home. The rest of the chat room will at least be used to people in other time zones on different schedules. This creates the interesting possibility of a shift worker establishing a friendship with someone a few streets away, who assumes their new friend who works from 10 pm until 4 am must be in another country.

This ‘anytime' aspect also helps insomniacs. When you can't sleep you can jump on the Internet and talk to people to get your mind off whatever it is that's keeping you awake. If you are lucky you can talk out your problem online with a bunch of anonymous strangers. Then you can go back to bed and straight to sleep. My advice for when you can't sleep is to avoid lying in bed and dwelling on the time slowly passing, worried that you will never sleep again. Better to get up and do something, to make yourself even more tired so you can get to sleep.

Not only does the Internet let you talk to people twenty four hours a day, but you can find people with similar interests anytime. My brother-in-law Brad is currently obsessed with a board game called Stratego. It is my brother's fault for showing him this dice-less board game. My brother has since lost interest in the game and Brad was having trouble finding some to play against him. Brad doesn't seem interested in any of the games the rest of us want to play, especially not if they involve dice. Luckily, Brad discovered he could play Stratego online and play against real people all day and all night, which according to his wife is exactly what he has been doing since discovering the online version of the game. So from her perspective, maybe there is a downside to him being able to play his favourite game with someone, somewhere, anytime.