Chat Roulette – The Horror

Ever been on Chat Roulette? No? Well I strongly recommend that you give it a whirl, providing you are over 18 and have a strong stomach...

A friend and I recently found ourselves with an event-free Saturday night and aside from the obvious take-away dinner and ‘Predator’ on the TV in the background, we had no entertainment. That was when we had the notion of visiting chatroulette.com – we had struck comedy gold.

For those of you who have never ‘Spun’, I can only really summarise Chat Roulette as a stomach-churning, fun-filled laugh-fest. Full of ‘stranger danger’, it can be a bit of a lottery really in terms of what or who you’ll stumble upon. You are free to join in on the fun and the banter with one-on-one conversations (or group chats depending on how many people are behind each webcam) without any form of registration and it’s all completely free. The website randomly links you up for a conversation with anyone anywhere in the world and you have no say over who you get. Cue the freak show.

With our webcam on and the connection linking up we waited with bated breath to see who we would be paired with for our first ‘chat’. Following an established connection of a brief second, if not a millisecond, we were ‘spun’ on to the next candidate – we had been skipped! Who was this person to dare overlook us like that?! Two *ahem* gorgeous young ladies looking for a few laughs and you skipped us?! ... must have been another woman ...

After a few more brief encounters we were matched with a normal looking person. So we skipped him – we weren’t there to make friends. Then; THE HORROR! The laptop screen was filled with male genitalia being furiously punished by its owner! Amid my own cries I heard my friend screaming “SPIN AGAIN! SPIN AGAIN! SPIN AGAIN!” So we spun.

We ‘met’ some interesting and rather humorous people on our journey around the world on that fateful night. Our personal highlights involved chatting to two other young ladies from the UK who were wearing last-minute home-made burkas and said they were also on the website to laugh at the sexually challenged men. We wished them luck and hoped they would have as much fun as us and then continued to spin the wheel. We also got chatting with a French indie band (or so they claimed) and I was very pleased indeed to put my French GCSE to good use. After asking their names, telling them they lived in a house and that I was English, they let out screams of joy at my dropping of the word ‘fromage’ and proclaimed their love for cheese. One of them even left the room and returned with a big wheel of cheese which they proceeded to eat in front of us while playing their guitars. We skipped soon afterwards.

A low-point of the event was receiving some abuse from three teenage boys from the UK. One was 17 and acceptable to look at. The other two ... meh, not so much. We were labelled as paedophiles and this made us sad. On the flip-side the most wondrous part of the night was when we were paired up with a ‘The Rock’ look-a-like. My oh my! He was delicious! Another Frenchman; he tried his best to form a decent conversation with us but inevitably it stalled and crushingly he skipped us. My friend was almost in tears.

Aside from the young ladies on this website who are clearly visiting under the same premise as my friend and I (i.e. to take the mick), there are definite groups/types of people who make up the user demographic. You get your teenage boys who are hoping to chat to some sexy ladies and be awarded the gold medal of a boob flash, your pairs/small groups of older men who tend to be from Eastern Europe and are hoping to chat to some sexy ladies and be awarded the gold medal of a boob flash and then of course you have the furious masturbators who think we love to see their special place. One man in particular, who looked oddly like Sadam Hussein, got so excited when he saw us appear that he leaped out of his chair and started dancing and shouting “GIRLS!” then proceeded to whip off his t-shirt and touch himself. We screamed (naturally) and hit the skip button quicker than you can say ‘retch’.

All-in-all, a very entertaining experience and one that I would recommend you try at least once in your lifetime. It was certainly eye-opening, as well as retch inducing, but we did have many-a-laugh with some people as equally curious as ourselves.

Maybe not for a Saturday night though; there’s much more going on in the world.