Unforeseen Consequences
It being mid-March, I figured it was time to check in on my loyal reader – BillytheKid28, man, I love you – and hope he and the rest of the internet had a half-decent Christmas, New Year, January, February, etc. Mine was good. Nice and quiet. Back to school now.
Ok, so the above is a lie. I probably would have left this ill-advised collection of ramblings to suffer the usual fate of blogs and descend to the deepest depths of stuff that’s totally ignored before being deleted by the wonderful guys at WordPress for taking up a perfectly serviceable web address. However, a few weeks ago, I received the holiest of holies in these murky layers of the blogosphere: an email, notifying me of a comment awaiting moderation.
Eyes agleam with hope and excitement, I opened this email with my fingers trembling on the mouse and found – well, I found something that would plunge me into a whirlwind of virtual excitement, something that would net this blog more views over two days than it has ever had in the rest of its short, sad lifetime. Unfortunately for you, it’s the sort of thing that requires a bit of backstory.
Last year, around October, I played a juvenile but highly entertaining prank on a friend – I loaded his blog with a number of idiotic and bizarre comments through a proxy IP and then sat back and watched him search frantically for whoever was responsible. I thought it was so funny that the very next day I posted about it right here for my reader to see – it’s in the post ‘October’ below, if you suddenly feel the urge to update yourself.
Well, this friend, sadly, did not take my cheerful jibes all that well – point of fact, I haven’t spoken to him since that night. Terrible shame. After a suitable mourning period, I moved on, and had relegated the memory to the ranks of unimportant-yet-vaguely-amusing anecdotes. But on this fateful summer morn a few weeks ago, I received the email that brought the whole thing back, with interest.
The comment was from my friend’s mother. This is not usually a good sign, and I started to feel a slight sense of foreboding. Then I read the comment itself. It was short, but lyrically accusatory. Apparently my mostly-forgotten stunt was only so at my end of things, and had in fact been eating away like some terrible acid at my friend over the intervening months. I’m not sure what exactly prompted this woman to contact me, but the general theme was that I had brutally, and with malicious intent, cyber-bullied her son. Moral guardians, register your outrage – and if you wish, the comment can be found on the post ‘October’, below.
I was more than a little shocked. In fact, I was so shocked that I followed my reading with about ten minutes of highly-inappropriate laughter. Then I sobered up and decided that I should respond in an adult way, so to prove my honour and the generally untarnished state of my soul. So I sent the woman an email, politely explaining what had happened. Oh, but first, I approved her comment – I figured this was only fair, given the various freedoms we’re so keen on here in the West, and also because she said I wouldn’t.
Feeling I had done the right thing, I settled back in my Evil Genius Corp. armchair to wait for her response. It never came. I retired late, thinking that perhaps that I would wake with her return email waiting for me, full of understanding and gentle rebuking. This was not the case. In fact, all I found was that the previous day I had received an unprecedented amount of traffic on the site, most of it being linked in from a Twitter account belonging to the lady I was dealing with. Other sources referred me to a blog post of her own, which followed the same theme as the comment she posted here but with much greater depth and a much fiercer tone. Apparently she had not enjoyed my email, thinking it arrogant and precocious of me to attempt to deal with her on such a personal level. Confused, but still keen to do the right thing, I sent another one, apologising for my forwardness and reiterating how regretful I was about the whole situation. Again, no response came to my Inbox, though I spent many a worried hour gnawing on my nails and repeatedly clicking the ‘Check Mail’ button.
All this time, I continued to receive huge (relatively) numbers of hits. I felt, given past actions, that she may have responded on her blog again, but on attempting to access it I was informed by my computer that only approved users could now view those pages. The same happened with the Twitter account. I had been locked out; the battle, at least from my end, appeared to be over. And that is how the situation stands currently.
So that, dear reader, is my tale, and I’ve just noticed how olde-worlde it became towards the end there. Ah well. I wish the best to my former friend and his family, and I think I’ll end this epic here.
Just before I do – a great big welcome goes out to the people behind the 126 hits I got a few weekends ago. Great to have new people passing through.
