Sympathy for the trolls: do everyone a favour and walk away from fights online

Everybody's been a troll at one point or another. Sometimes we know when we're trolling, but mostly we're just having a bad day (or week, month, year) and we take it out on someone else.

Sometimes we take it out on customer service representatives on the phone. That's the trolling I'm particularly guilty of, and the one I'm most ashamed of: for some reason I always find myself railing at the phone company. (Which phone company? Any of them.  All of them.)  Thankfully, although those conversations are recorded, they aren't (yet) transcribed and posted publicly.  (Now that would make people behave better on the phone.)

But mostly, it's a case of Duty Calls (when Someone is Wrong on the Internet) and we allow a disagreement to escalate.  I had one of these happen to me today, and I (for once) didn't make it worse.  I was proud of myself because I responded with grace and humour, attempted to defuse the situation, and didn't respond when it got truly nasty.

Instead of mixing it up and making things worse, I went for a walk with my husband and dog, where we saw flames peeking out of a big paper recycling bin.  My husband got someone to call the fire department while I ran to find a fire extinguisher, and then another when the police had used that one up and the fire had reignited.  Very exciting, but at least the fire didn't get out of control for very long before the firefighters arrived:

Later I was especially pleased that I didn't bite because I looked at the troll's Twitter account and saw that he was genuinely upset, having left the forum because of poor quality conversations (apparently a pattern he is experiencing). A woman I know once cried in frustration, "why is it that wherever I work, there's always some bitch who makes life miserable for me?"  Indeed.

Nothing I said could have made it better: he needed me to be the villain.  Okay then.  But that doesn't mean I had to feed the fire; I didn't need to correct him, I didn't need to have the last word, and I didn't need to humiliate him.  He took care of it himself.  And it turns out I really did have better things to do.

In closing: not the most mature choice of videos, but hey, gotta be me.

"Fire! Fire! Come in through the back door...
Fire! Fire! I want to be a fireman... and handle your hose."

Britney's concert performance would have been impressive if she were paraplegic

She may well have been, as far as I could see from her concert performance tonight in Vancouver. There were so many different props and mobility devices onstage it looked like James Bond getting an equipment demonstration by Q in the basement of Walter Reed Medical Center. A moving sidewalk. Various suspensory harnesses, chairs, swings, rising balconies, elevators, carried chairs, motorized vehicles, and strapping porters to carry her from place to place. If she took 200 steps during the entire performance I'd be surprised. She did climb two staircases and walk rapidly across stage a couple of times, so if she is paraplegic, she uses those nerve induction thingies you see on the discovery channel.

Needless to say, singing was not on the menu. I was surprised when she showed up without a corset, as she looked pretty good. Then later she stopped sucking in her gut and, well, it didn't look so impressive. On the whole it was a disappointment, and the sad thing is I didn't expect much.

Attention whores in the reputation economy

Yesterday on my way home I saw an ambulance driver texting as she drove. (At least she didn't have her siren and lights on.) But that wasn't the ironic part - no, that was the act of will that kept me from whipping out my phone and tweeting about it. Or better yet, whipping out my phone, taking a picture of her while I attempted to drive, and then tweeting the link. On the whole I'm glad I made it home alive.

The walk to the subway station this morning was surreal. It was snowing pink cherry blossoms which covered the streets and the grass, making me think of nuclear fallout and what a challenge it would be to clean that up if it wasn't just, you know, flower petals.

So then at the subway station there were new additions to the usual gauntlet of free newspaper pushers: a couple of well-scrubbed men pushing The Watchtower. So many voices clamoring to be heard.

The problem isn't an attention deficit, it's a surplus of bullshit. We create a cloud, a lake, an ocean, a galaxy of data, simultaneously afraid of where all this data is going and afraid that if we don't reveal more our voice won't be heard. We've reached the point of saturation with trivia and are waiting for the tool that will come along and stitch it together, but we're afraid of what that'll show. Mostly we're afraid that it'll expose our banality, our utter simplicity and lack of special worthiness of this embarrassment of riches that has been visited upon us.

I have the whole of human knowledge at my fingertips and I want to know more about the Octomom.