©iStockphoto.com/Andrew Manley
Lazy people are the reason I hate pretty much everything, not just message boards. It’s not just the laziness, it’s the sheer lack of shame about being so lazy. It is probably because most of the world does not have a Korean mother. There is a word in Korean, it is pronounced something like “yom chay”; I do not know the literal meaning of this word or phrase, but I think it applies to lazy people on the internet who try and get other people to do their work for them. Also, people who try to sneak in front of you in line and people who don’t add money for tip and tax when you’re dividing up the bill. It’s a good word, we should have it in English.
Who Are The Yom Chay Among Us?
Assuming that I have the definition of this word right – and it’s not really guaranteed, the word I thought my mother used as a term of endearment for me turns out to mean something like “wretched beast from the rice paddy” – I think I should further clarify by way of providing examples. Some of these things are familiar from previous WIHMMBs, like I said, it’s a vast interlocking web of hateables out there.
Our Old Friend EGQoF
Or Easily Googled question of fact. To be fair, sometimes it’s just plain less than brightness that’s behind EGQoF but even then some laziness is probably involved. Maybe loneliness – you know, like those old people that stop you on the street to ask you questions that they already know the answer to. You feel for them, but at the same time you feel vaguely intruded upon.
EGQoF makes me feel for the librarians, I bet they’ve always had that problem. I remember once going to the library with my cousin and instead of going to the library she called and asked them for the names of some books about Mark Twain and told them to get them for her and she’d be by to pick them up. Yeah, it was back in the day when you had to use the card catalog but come on, Mark Twain? For a high school paper? The librarian has better things to do! Look it up yourself!
Maybe it’s the whole card catalog thing that gets me so irate about EGQoF – back in my day if you wanted to know something and it wasn’t in your World Book Encyclopedia at home (we weren’t rich enough for Britannica) you had to either walk to the library or hope your mom took pity on you and gave you a ride and thumb through dozens of index cards, write the dewey decimal number down yourself with a half-ass pencil on a piece of scratch paper and go and find the physical book, look in the index and hopefully find your answer. And now people can’t be bothered to figure out how to find out how many ounces in a cup themselves? Screw them! I’ve taken to just making up answers, what are they going to do, look it up and prove me wrong?
I’m too lazy to search
It doesn’t make it any better when people ask others to find things for them because they are too lazy to do it themselves. I’m not sure why they think it would – that seems to be the trend these days, to admit to things like sloth, gluttony, avarice, what have you in a manner that suggests that other people will find this endearing. It is not. It is the kind of thing that sends you to one of the circles of hell. Do you think that there is cute in hell? There is not. Industry, self-sufficiency, gumption, these are cute things. Not laziness.
Tell Me How To Do This
Or, put time and effort in explaining step by step how to do something even though it has already been done and is available in something called “the instructions” or “the manual”. What do they call it? Read the fucking manual? Look this up on Google, I am sure somebody has already elaborated on this for me.
Stealth Lazy
Sometimes people will pretend to ask for an opinion or feedback – don’t be fooled, it only leads to follow up question after follow up question until you get so frustrated you do it for them yourself. Don’t fall for it! Give them the feedback then disappear before they have a chance sneak in a follow up question. And whatever you do, don’t give them your IM screen name, unless you’re prepared to be invisible all the time – or you can do what I do, continually have more children so nobody questions when you have to disappear for long periods of time.
Really, I should save my wrath for those people who continually enable the lazy, but they enjoy being useful and I can’t help but think that trait might be useful to me in my endeavors and so I shall conveniently ignore their wrong-headedness. In the meantime, feel free to do your best to try and shame the lazy into being productive Google using, manual reading, initiative showing message board citizens by any means necessary. You’ll find that people can be surprisingly energetic in thinking of ways to call you an asshole.
Read all the reasons why I hate my message board
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