captainheller-blog

[captainheller-blog]

Confessions of an Internet Troll

As I am writing this, I realise that probably half of you will agree with me, possibly pointing at the screen and yelling obscenities before leaving some scathing commentary, while the other half of you will shrink away ashamed. I am a troll. An internet troll that is. Once upon a time, in the early days of the web, I turned into a self-appointed Grammar-Nazi and fact checker. I don’t know why I became that way. Blame my upbringing in a conservative Catholic school, where grammatical mistakes were punishable by death. Perhaps you could point at my parents, who insisted I learn to speak without any inflexion or dialect. Or it could be a genetic condition, a mental disorder, OCD or just plain mischief. It causes me mental anguish to see a misspelt word or phrase, or one of the endlessly forwarded posts on Facebook that urge you to say Amen to a photo of a kid with cancer, who is now a 15-year-old with a cocaine addiction. Or the money post with the poorly spelt meme urging you to repost this picture of a bank note immediately or have 15 years of bad luck. Per those posts, I will never be happy. I am facing at least a millennium of torture before anything good can happen to me. It takes a right click in search in most cases to do a quick background check. If in doubt, search it up on Snopes. The same people that are crying out about Donald Trump’s “Fake News” are the ones that forward pure lies on Facebook. “My friend posted it, and it is on the internet, so it must be true”. Remedies and cures that will kill you. Household tips that will land you in the hospital. Political rumours solely put out there for propaganda. Haven’t you learned from the White House, yet? It doesn’t matter which side of the political coin you may worship, neither tells the truth anymore. “Your” and “You’re” are just painful. “Me an you” causes convulsions. “H8py Bday, Bru”, “Gna Cl U”, and others make me want to scream out loud. Reading those mangled and disfigured groups of letters cause my brain to go into meltdown, into a self-preservation mode, into a grey matter defence stance. Is it so difficult to spend a few extra seconds to check your grammar? And I am not without fault, here. I, too, mistype, misspell, and make mistakes but at least I am trying! Is it too much to ask? Yes, I can block them. Sure. The same way you can stop smoking or give up coffee. I could simply ignore them. No, I can’t. I cannot ignore them. I cannot bear them, but I cannot ignore them, either. There is no cure for this. I’m a troll. I know, I am. I’m incorrigible. Imperfect. No doubt. OCT = Obsessive Compulsive Troll. That’s me.