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."

This week's happy news

• We have a carbon tax! Today is a happy day to live in British Columbia.
• Oil closed at $100.01 per barrel today; so much for "just a fluke". Maybe this will prompt thirteen more people to take the bus. Food will be more expensive, but maybe we don't have a right to fresh out-of-season fruit from another hemisphere.
• The house displayed some spine, even if the supreme court sold us out on spying.
• Kosovo declares independence. Why the hell not? Infinite secession is a potential cure for nationalism.
• The tide is beginning to turn against abusive end-user license agreements.
• The government is further expelled from the bedrooms of Texas.
• Scientology further restricts the availability of its crazy course materials. On the other hand, this stuff is high comedy.