Thursday, August 09, 2007

If you find my body, here's what happened


You'd be amazed at what people take seriously in this life. There's an unjust war in Iraq, global warming around the world, and a Republican administration rolling back decades of American progress.

Instead of all that, someone has sworn blood oath against me for removing two bytes of data.

So, onto the story:

Last night, I was watching Giants-Nationals (what else is there to watch? Yankees are winning, Mets are losing, next page, please), and saw Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run. As a regular user of Wikipedia, I can almost imagine the amount of vandalism that goes on during a current event, so I revert a couple of edits, one of them being the addition of asterisks next to Bonds' statistics, by someone named Sven Jacobsen (by the way, adding 69 to the end of a user name stopped being cute when AOL CDs were all over the place).

In the morning I had some cereal and, when that wasn't enough, the leftover macaroni and cheese. When I open my messages on Facebook, I get one from dear Sven:

Subject: Motherfucker.

Why the fuck did you revert my edit? Do you really believe Barry didn't use
steroids?

I demand you put my edit back up.

Well, someone's definitely been taking steroids.

The reply was polite but brief:

Subject: Re: Motherfucker.

As a courtesy, I should let you know that I have reported your message to
Facebook administrators.

Roehl

It's the old school Internet user in me. Don't dignify the content of the complaint, period. Profanities don't deserve a reply touching on the merits (or lack) of the original message.

Within two hours (two! I must've sent him a message in the middle of his pornography session), I get this:


Subject: Re: Re: Motherfucker.

I know the drill. They'll give me a warning, maybe even suspend me for a
few days. But that's it.

Let's see: I lose facebook for a few days, but rgs216@nyu.edu will be
spammed every single day. Relentlessly.

You fucked with the wrong guy.

Put the asterisk back up or else.


Seriously? Or else I get spam? All this vitriol over a trivial edit, and the most serious threat is I get spam?

I guess I expect something more, but this guy's really angry, so just in case...my collection of baseball cards are hidden in the cedar closet. A set of ESL lessons I've developed over the years are both in my password-protected computer and a notebook I've kept...somewhere safe. The combination to my luggage is the number of a flight I've taken in the last ten years.

Tell Nicole from junior high that I thought she was really cute.

I love you all. Please miss me when I'm gone.
EDIT - Already got another message!
HAHAHAHA

No wonder you lost that election. People would rather vote for a Republican
than a douche of your caliber. Initially I was just bluffing. However, now I'm
serious. You're the type of person who needs to escalate the situation as
quickly as you can, probably because you don't know how to deal with people. You
want to escalate the situation? Ok, you've done just that.

-I will keep an eye on you (Google Alerts automates this task for me), and
if you ever run for any sort of office again, I'll send all this to your
opponent. Hopefully you'll lose by a larger margin than you did last time.

-If I get banned from facebook, life goes on. However, all of this is saved
locally and will be backed up in multiple locations.

-I'll have your ipods/xboxes/PS3s shipped to:
(old address, deleted)

-I'll find your other email addresses; I'm very good at that sort of
thing.

Oh, one more thing: to prove to you I am serious, I have just sent a
barbequed chicken pizza to your house. Enjoy.

Oh, I forgot to mention, if you put the asterisk back up in the next 24
hours, you avoid all of this.

Cheers!
No pizza so far. Probably because he sent it to the wrong address. A shame, though, I'm hungry now.

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