Or, another reason why I hate my message board

A photo of a prank I found on Flickr, Photo Credit Goldberg

Note: The forum in question doesn’t exist any more.

Last year when my forums were shiny and new, I anticipated with great glee my first April Fool’s Day as a site owner/administrator. Oh! How many days did I spend merrily thinking of all the mischief I could cause? How sweet was the anticipation? The possibilities! Oh, the possibilities!

Now, here’s the thing with me, I’m not sure if it’s a plus or a minus; that is something for each person to decide for themselves. I have this ability to think of things that would be funny to do, but then instead of doing them, I keep thinking and find reasons why I probably shouldn’t do them. So, most of my ideas were discarded just as quickly as I came up with them.

Give everyone some strange default av? Somebody would get upset that I’d stolen their individuality.

Pretend I shut the board down or accidentally deleted all the threads? A lot of people would be angry at me toying with them and potentially very upset if they had a particularly important thread going.

Redirect url to porn site? Somebody could get fired.

As you can see coming up with a suitably mild prank was more difficult than you’d think. Finally, the moderation team and I settled on using the bad word filter to change a few common words. Specifically, I changed lol to “I am amused, mildly” and all the other lol-nyms to similar phrases I can’t remember and swapped vegemite for peanut butter and vice versa (this last was never discovered, which was a shame because it would have been funny given a discussion that was going on at the time).

How could this go wrong you might ask? Well…it turns out that a poster on our board had a terrible experience that left her quite shaken. Another poster replied to her and said something comforting then something self-deprecating followed by a lol. Sort of a nervous giggle kind of lol, which was turned into “I am amused, mildly”.

Another poster was upset at what she thought was this poster being amused, mildly by the horrific experience of the original poster and there was much confusion. All of this happened while I was asleep, so it took a while before we could straighten everything out. You can imagine the arguing over whether or not this was funny or not and in the end one poster left and I wound up looking like a jerk.

Needless to say, I won’t be doing that again!

If you’re in IHMMB poster and would still like to be pranked, here’s what you should do. Go to the bottom of the forum page. Where it says “Order: Last Post” pick an order at random. Similarly, you can change Z-A to A-Z. The thread titles will now be arranged by poster name or number of posts or the oldest posts will be first. Go away for a few minutes and forget you did it.

When you come back, choose randomly from one of these options:

• Read a few posts, say “Hey, didn’t we talk about this in June?” think for a second, say AHA! Change the order of the threads back to most recent first and have a mild chuckle imaging everyone else’s confusion.
• Read a few posts, say “Hey, didn’t we talk about this in June?” start a thread to ask “WTF?” (use that as your title) and when you don’t see it on the list of first page threads, either search for it and keep bumping it up or start a new thread. Repeat.
• Read a few posts, say “Hey, didn’t we talk about this in June?”, think for a second, get angry at this waste of your time, put threads back in proper order and start a thread titled “WTF, this crap isn’t funny!!!!!!!!”
• Read a few posts, say “Hey, didn’t we talk about this in June?” and go and post something on my Facebook wall asking WTF? Make sure to mention something about not desiring to do housework.
• Read a few posts, say “Hey, didn’t we talk about this in June?” and start a thread on one or more other forums people from IHMMB post on titled “Hey, is anyone having trouble with IHMMB?”

And there you have it, your virtual April Fool’s from your buddies at IHMMB. Thank you, you’ve been great! Make sure to tip your servers on the way out!

Or, WIHMMB #11 A lack of clear titles

A collection of titles that don't work

As I’ve said a few times in a few places, my resolution for 2009 was to be more helpful and less of a pokey prodder. This was probably not a good goal for somebody whose site’s entire premise is based on hating something and pointing out all the flaws. But you know what I like about me? My overcomenaciousness and with that in mind I decided to continue my “Why I Hate My Message Board” series as long as I only pointed out things that people could change, not things they can’t like “you ugly”.

BTW, if your first reaction to “you ugly” is to get out your guitar and start playing “Everything is Beautiful” in a non-ironic manner, this is probably not the series for you and you should probably defriend me without delay before my negative nature corrupts all that is beautiful and good in you.

Understand your limitations

I just don’t understand why people can’t come up with a good title. My best guess is that they have this odd idea that their titles need to be something grand like “For Whom the Bell Tolls” or “A Farewell to Arms” and get so intimidated trying to come up with something profound or clever they just give up and go with “What? Question? Why does that do this?” This is a message board, not a literary agency. Go with a concise description of the contents of your post. That is creative enough for the likes of you.

Your title is your opportunity to sell us on opening and reading and responding to your thread. Do you want people to read and reply to your threads? If not, why the hell are you posting them on the internet and wasting bandwidth? Take a minute and come up with a descriptive title, it’s worth the effort.

Don’t be a tease

I just chopped my dog in half

—-8 inches of wasted space–

These 1 lb hotdogs are HUGE!!!

It’s not really that funny, is it? You know how they say sarcasm is the lowest form of humor? It’s not, that would be the old fake-out. Or bait n’ switch. Whatever you want to call it. Now some people, they are funny people and maybe, just maybe, if they don’t do it too often, can make this sort of teaser title work. You? Can’t. And the whole scroll doooooown thing has got to end. This is 2009, we have spoiler tags. Learn to use them.

Do you really even need to start a thread?

If everything you have to say in the thread can be posted in the title and it involves you eating something and laughing about it, you don’t need to start a thread about it. What you have there is a sentence and you should wait until you get a collection of them to fashion into a paragraph; then you can work on deciding on a title and posting it.

Avoid Redundancy

If the title of your post is “Baby set on fire and decapitated by sitter!!” you don’t need to subtitle it: Warning death mentioned, might be sensitive.

L@@K!!!!

Is just plain hateful.

My helpful bit

Clear, concise titles are the key to getting people to read your threads. If you have a history of using vague, misleading or just plain stupid titles you run the risk of annoying your fellow posters and might not get the responses you’d hoped for on your threads.

My unhelpful bit

If you are using clear, descriptive thread titles and people still aren’t biting, have you considered that you might just be boring?

Photo credit ©iStockphoto.com/creacart

I put away the reasons why I hate my message board for awhile because in truth it was difficult for me to find an acceptable way to complain about people who were more or less my customers on the front page of a website most of them visit every day. It seems kind of ungrateful, doesn’t it? Here, come help me grow my big corporate empire you worthless, lazy, ignorant, annoying whine-babies! That sounds inviting, doesn’t it? Although in all honestly, I’m pretty sure 99% of them didn’t think I was talking about them and the 1% who did take it personally had low self esteem and expected nothing better.

Still, it was a problem until I really and truly accepted the truth into my heart: if they leave just because I think they are whine-babies and told the whole world so, that means they really weren’t my friends after all and I am better off without them and so I have decided to continue this series.

You’d think people would ask me all the time what it’s like to have such an important job as message board owner and administrator (root administrator, mind you, not just regular old administrator) but I think maybe one person did, at the beginning, just to be polite. That’s the problem with people these days, they lack curiosity and an interest in how things work. Oh the wisdom I could impart to them if only they were open to receive it! My heart aches for the lost opportunities, but what are you going to do? Blog about it? Ha!

Most days it’s a pretty easy gig. I check my email often to see if anyone is having problems, do a quick scan of the boards several times a day to make sure nobody has started a thread titled “OMG, WTF, HELP! I have a PROBLEM!” or that there is no interesting drama that might need monitoring in case a cat fight breaks out. Make sure we have money coming in to pay the bills, that sort of thing. It’s not what I dreamed of doing as an idealistic high school student, but it feels good to provide a service people need.

And then there are the other days. Have you ever had a party at your house get out of hand? People you don’t know show up and invite other people and before you know it, your house is crowded with people who have no idea who you are, and what’s more even if they did know, they really don’t care. You’re standing right there, right next to them even, and they are making fun of your furniture and complaining about the food and when you go over to talk to say hi and be a good host, they ignore you and keep jabbering away with their friends. Meanwhile people are smoking inside and putting drinks on tables without coasters and people either ignore you or get huffy puffy when you ask them to stop. Finally, it’s time for everyone to leave and a couple of folks say thanks but most people just shuffle out, many of them talking about the even better party they should have gone to instead.

That’s what a really bad day as a message board administrator is like. It’s a job and just like any other you often feel unappreciated and misunderstood but have to bite your tongue lest you get fired or people start thinking that you’re an oversensitive whackadoodle. The thing is, you do have to be careful what you say, lest people think that you are trying to make them feel beholden to you. Or worse, that you are on a power trip. Nobody wants that, I certainly don’t want people to think that they owe me something or have to walk on eggshells around me.

I think that for the most part people just forget that I, and every other message board administrator/owner out there have a lot invested in their boards. I do want the members to feel a sense of ownership in the boards. I do want them to feel free to come to me with ideas, suggestions, criticism and problems. I do not want them to feel like it’s my way or the high way.

That said, it’s hard some days not to let it get to you. Some days I really do want to just let it fly and ask “Hey, how would you feel if you spent all day fixing a problem, and people’s response to that was ‘that problem sucked. frowny face’?” or “Hey, how would you like it if you were telling people important information they needed but nobody could be bothered to acknowledge that you said something?” That actually might not go over to badly, except that I’d add something unhelpful like “because Lord knows we all listen to you moan and groan enough”.

On really bad days, I’m always tempted to cleverly disguise my complaints about message board administrating in the form of a story about something bad some person offline did to me. In my head I call these the parables of the bitches. And I imagine all the sympathy I’d get and all the commiseration and then I’d say “Look at yourselves, for you, YOU were the ones that were so ugly to me!” It seems to me that it would backfire horribly so I haven’t done it yet, but I get a great adolescent sense of satisfaction imaging how sorry everyone would be once they realized how truly wounded a soul I am.

That’s really not how the world works, though, is it? For the most part, people want you to do your job and let them go about their business. You can’t always expect support and a cheering section and frankly sometimes the better you do, the less people think to encourage you. Sometimes that’s when people start subtly discouraging you. If you’re an 80s style can do person like I am, you wallow in the self pity for a minute, pull on the leg warmers and make your passion happen. But first, make a list of all the people that wronged you so that you can snub them when you make it big. There is no reason positivity can’t go hand in hand with petty list making. No reason at all.

Oh yes, I did embed a cheesy 80s video in my post. Without one ounce of shame – not even a gram.

©iStockphoto.com/Andre Nantel

Why I hate my message board reason number nine is not because my message board is all about me; no, it’s because other people want to make it all about them, all of the time. Sometimes, certainly it’s acceptable to make a thread all about oneself, for example if you graduated from college or had a baby or even have an interesting or funny anecdote go ahead and make it all about you. Everyone gets to be a star sometimes.

The problem is sometimes people don’t like other people to shine. Some people are vast black holes of need, pulling every eye towards their infinite density. You must avoid entering the event horizon of such people, lest you be sucked in. Not all black hole people are evil in the way say Pol Pot was evil mind you, but they all have an amazing singularity of thought: themselves.

There are two main categories of black hole people: the enthusiastic and the paranoid.

The Enthusiastic

The enthusiastic BHP simply enjoys talking about themselves. You have a dog? They have a dog, too and it was the best dog ever and they loved it the most anyone has ever loved a dog and your dog reminds them of their dog and they are dog people, don’t you know? Your kid is cute? Their kid is adorable! And he walked two months before your kid and they love them so much, they would die for them, and they don’t ever want them to grow up and leave! Every single thing you say is an opportunity to talk about themselves, not in the normal way that people share stories as a way to find common ground and bond, although it might appear that way at first. More like life is a game of improv to them and you are just the audience shouting out topics for them to expound upon.

The Paranoid

The paranoid BHP thinks that everything even slightly negative you say is a personal slam on them. You don’t like dogs? Well, they have a dog, and it’s a very well behaved dog, thank you very much and they don’t see why anyone would be bothered by them having a dog. Why are you so judgmental? Your kids are cute? What, and their kids aren’t? We don’t all have money for fancy clothes and professional photography, unlike some people who think their kids are so much better than everyone else’s. Everything is an opportunity for them to air out their narcissistic inferiority complex, and not in the normal way that people share their dislikes and likes in order to understand another’s point of view and bond, although it might appear that way if you are an optimist. More like life is a huge trial to them, and you are the opposing council and they must put on the defense of their lives.

All you can really do to BHP is to do your best not to get sucked. “Really, that’s interesting” is all you should say and then move on. Do not try to take control of the conversation unless you are a trained professional. This is why I firmly believe all high school students should be trained in the dramatic arts – it teaches you to project your voice and to ignore distractions and focus on your own performance. That’s the only way to deal with BHPs, really, be an even bigger BHP and knock them out of orbit. Break a leg!

©iStockphoto.com/Andre Nantel

One of the charming things about discussion board threads is the way the conversation naturally goes off on tangents and how multiple discussions can spring from the original post, like the strands of silk in a spider’s web. There might be situations where it behooves the message board management to keep threads strictly on topic, but in general I love watching a conversation naturally evolve as idea sparks idea and thoughts evoke memories.

Naturally being the keyword, as there is almost nothing so annoying as intentional attempted derailment.

What Is Intentional Attempted Derailment?

Intentional Attempted Derailment (or I.A.D.) is hijacking the conversation for the sake of hijacking it, or more rarely, for nefarious purposes which we’ll discuss later. The most common motivation of I.A.D. is to get attention, or to use the vernacular, because the hijacker “thinks s/he’s cute”. Look at me! Tossing in the tangents! I am giddy with the prospect of attention! I read once that the most despicable quality a woman can have in the eyes of other women is to think herself “cute”. If you don’t know what is meant by that, I am not even going to try to explain it to you, because I’ll just wind up making myself look like a miserable ass while you ask “Why? Why does it bother you if she thinks she’s cute? What am I missing here? Isn’t self esteem a good thing? Why do women do this to each other?” And I’ll just mutter something about “boys do it too!” because I know they do even if they don’t call it “cute”. It’s why my husband hates Jim on the office; I think the term he uses most often is “smug wanker”.

People would like to tell you differently, but there is only a certain amount of attention that can be paid. If somebody is trying to get more than their fair share by unsavory means like I.A.D. others are going to notice, and resent it, because they’ve been trying to play fair. Listening to people, forming a response relating to what has been said and at the same time adding to the conversation, well that takes work and it’s not appreciated when somebody does the virtual equivalent of jumping on a table, doing a cartwheel and shouting “Woo Hoo! Look At Me!”

Of course, sometimes the people most miffed by I.A.D. are the most guilty of it themselves. That doesn’t mean they aren’t right about it being heinous.

Nefarious I.A.D.

Nefarious I.A.D. is when a poster attempts to derail a conversation and turn it into a trainwreck. Sometimes they are trying to start a flamefest on another poster – this is tricky though, because sometimes the flamethrower must come out and even though it’s technically a derailment, it’s not about the flamer’s need for attention. Although a lot of times it is. Like I said, it’s tricky. Just as often, it’s a poster throwing a statement out there they must know will get them singed down to the hairs in their crack because negative attention seems to be like crack on message boards. Without Nefarious I.A.D. there wouldn’t be nearly as much internet drama, which is why even though I know a sure fire way to stop it, I’m not telling anyone. I need the traffic, I have bills to pay.

©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
Talk about what annoys you on the internet in our forums.

©iStockphoto.com/Oktay Ortakcioglu

Hitting submit without adding much of substance (HSW/OAMoS) is a big problem on the internet. It’s a bit tricky to talk about, because there are some times when it’s perfectly okay to say the same thing everyone else did – like when somebody’s pet iguana dies, there’s really not much you can say except “I’m sorry”. Grief threads are not a good time to try and exercise your creativity, ask me how I know.

There are three categories of HSW/OAMoS, of course there is some overlap with “Message Board as Blog”, “Purposeful Attempted Derailment”, “It’s All About ME” and “Lazy People”. In fact, all the categories of Message Board Hate overlap to such a degree that you can’t even make a meaningful Venn Diagram out of it, as it would look something like this:

Answers That Don’t Really Answer The Question

For example when a thread is posted titled “Does Anyone Have A Wizzinator 5000?” asking if so, do you like it, where did you get it, and so on. And somebody comes along and posts “No, I don’t have one.” It’s baffling. It’s befuddling. I think the problem is, people like questions they can answer. It makes them feel smart. That’s why threads like “What kind of car do you have?” or “What color are your eyes?” get so many replies. It’s nice to know the answers. I can sort of see folks, looking at that thread title and thinking “Why no! No I do not have a Wizzinator 5000! I know this one!” and confidently hitting the submit button with the satisfaction of a job well done. There’s not much to be done about these people, because you’d kind of look like the kind of asshole who kicks puppies if you mentioned it. Better to stew in your own hate.

I Must Note My Agreement

Even if it involves quoting a huge string of embedded quotes just to say “ITA”. The real fun is when several people in a row do this and you find yourself having to scroll down about 24 inches to find something new to read in the thread. The problem is, on the internet, nobody can see you nod, so if you want to participate in the conversation without saying anything, this is the way to do it. And again, there really is no good way to tell people not to do it without looking like the kind of jerk that feeds kittens Ex-Lax. Freedom of repeating other people’s speech, dammit!

I Must Note My Tangential Experience, No Matter How Inconsequential

Say there’s a thread, maybe about The Bahamas. Maybe somebody is going there on vacation and people are discussing what to do and see there, what to pack, the fact that you can’t drive there, the obligatory “I’m jealous! Pack me in your suitcase”, that sort of stuff. Then out of the blue somebody pops in with “My sister’s neighbor is from The Bahamas”. And nothing else. Again, baffling. Again, bemusing. Again, you can’t really say anything without looking like the kind of shit that rubs mascara in the eyes of bunnies just to make sure the cruelty free safety testing really works.

As you can see, content free posting is a problem without a solution. Some would probably say it’s not really a problem. Or rather, they’d wait for somebody else to say it so they could quote it and say ITA.

Hobgoblin of Little Minds. I’m not going to lie to you, I’m disappointed that you didn’t get it straight away.

To start, you must know I’m a Gemini and although I think astrology is complete bunk, I’m not above using it as a reason to justify me being fickle, superficial and easily bored. So easily bored that I’m already ready to get up and stop writing this, because I’m growing weary of my slap-dash writing style. It’s really not respecting the craft of writing to be so casual about it all, is it? That’s why none of the good writers respect me, that and I might have been overheard saying I’m bored of people nattering on and on about their craft.

Even if I’m not of the artisan class of writers, they of the crafting and the honing and the polishing, I do have some reverence for words and it pains me to see them abused. This isn’t about spelling or grammar, it’s really not my thing to be picky about something so pedestrian and easily corrected; it’s a style issue, and as such endlessly open to debate. I am calling this class of offense viral words, both because they make me a little queasy and because they spread like mono at a high school dance.

So, how does this relate to message boards?

The problem on message boards isn’t that people use words in a way I find distasteful, it’s that people use words in a way I find distasteful and others emulate them, intentionally or not. Perhaps they do it because, having bad taste, they think it will add zip and flair to their writing. I wish that the general public would cease to try and add zip and flair to everything, it usually winds up a hot, bedazzled mess. Embrace the ordinary, that’s my motto.

It could be that people just absorb these words just like one sometimes do with accents, which is unfortunate because just like with the accents, the effect is incomplete and jarring and leaves you thinking “something just isn’t right here”. You can’t just pluck a word that isn’t your style and throw it into your writing willy nilly. For example, I am not the sort of person who says words like “exigent” and if I were to come up with a sentence like “We have an exigent fart situation here, somebody light a match”, you’d give me the crazy eyes and wonder if I was listening to vocabulary tapes in my sleep.

Now that I think of it, this comes up a lot with words that are other than American English. Arse. Shite. (Baby) bump. Most instances of feck. It just doesn’t sound right plopped down in the middle of an otherwise American corn fed, apple pie style sentence. I know languages borrow from each other all of the time, but I am not sure why we need to borrow words for Ass, Shit, (Baby) Belly and Fuck. Why can’t we borrow words like mucky-gobbed slapper? That, I could get behind.

Other words I find bothersome

• ‘Tis - I am convinced that people use this so much because they can’t remember it’s/its. If you are going to start a sentence with ’tis, the rest of it better be in iambic pentameter or I’m going to be annoyed.
• Babe - When referring to a baby. The only babes I know are the Little Lord Jesus and Sonny & Cher. I do not know about your baby, but mine does not have hair down to his ass and a mustache.
• Loathe - a good, solid word that normally I enjoy but people seem intent on watering it down. People can’t possibly loathe a quarter of the things they claim to, otherwise they’d explode from all that pent up disgust. We’ve already watered down hate, use that instead.
• Natch - what is wrong with “naturally”? Or if you must try and spiff it up a bit, you could use the German Natürlich. Borrowing words from foreign languages is okay, I’ve just got a thing against OTAESBA.
• Spork (in my eye) – is it too much to ask that we try and come up with a different phrase? It makes me want to curl up in a ball like an armadillo and wait to become roadkill. Not that, because I’ve just said it and become bored with it. Just use some creativity.
• Divine - again, watering down the words. God is divine, your crock pot étouffée just smells delicious. Tasty. Maybe scrumptious but I doubt it, I’ve seen your recipes.

Clearly, I could go on, but I will stop here as it is likely I have managed to insult 97% of my audience. That is fine, it’s never been easy to be a crusader and I accept the burden with a humble willingness to be of service to the words. That’s me, humble handmaiden to our lexicon, willing defender of our language, tireless advocate for pragmatics. I am indeed, a Word Warrior.

I know, I know didn’t I just finish talking about how much I hate when grown folks whine? And now here I am saying I don’t like it when other people do the same thing, only that’s not precisely what I am doing but I can see where somebody not learned in the subtleties of whining and complaining could have trouble seeing the difference.

The distinction lies in whining vs. merely complaining, venting or offering an anecdote of a bothersome occurrence. Whining, of course, can include those things, but in and of themselves they are not whining. Whining is complaining without style, venting without insight and offering anecdote after anecdote without any consideration of your audience.

Pull your drawers out your ass

It must also be noted that merely offering the complainer, venter or storyteller an alternate point of view is perfectly acceptable, this is called making conversation. It becomes a problem when there is an undue amount of concern over the state of the undergarments of the complainant’s undergarments, this is called Pantiesinawadaphobia. I am not a professional psychologist (although I am pretty good at it), but my best guess is that people with this condition have had some tragedy in their life centered around underpants, perhaps a wedgie or particularly embarrassing VPL, and don’t quite know anymore what normal is, as far as panties are concerned.

That bothers you?

There is also a separate condition in which the sufferer seems to mistake “found interesting enough to write about” for “worked up”. This inability to recognize the complainant’s mild annoyance, and instead substituting the term “worked up” is very interesting and to me indicates classic Freudian projection. Again, I don’t have a degree in this sort of thing, but when my children were small I was up many an early morning watching Discovery Psychology with Philip Zimbardo, the slightly Mephistopheles-looking guy that did the Stanford Prison Experiment. I have five children, that’s a lot of early mornings with PBS, I think I’m something of an expert on beginning psychology by now. Back to my point, it seems patently obvious that the “I wouldn’t get worked up over that” crowd has some sort of latent hostility bubbling all up in their Id and I would use care in engaging them.

A whining opportunity

There is also a sub-category of whiners that enjoys swooping into any complaining thread hoping to take it over with their own complaints, or for the especially gutsy whiner, as an opportunity to try to get some licks in. This could take the form of complaining trying to one-up the complainant, mentioning that the last time they said something similar people jumped on them (HOLMs Syndrome) or most infuriatingly saying that they are sorry, they know how it feels. Or they could try to join the pantiesinawadaphobics and unworkedup in a pile-on, but this seldom works out very well for them. I’ll go into more detail on this in Reason #9 – It’s all about ME!

Cue the stirring music

The thing is, without complaining, message boards would be pretty dull places. You can only talk about the things you like so much before you start wanting to punch yourself for sounding like an infomercial host. Sometimes you just need to tell somebody all the little things that irk and niggle, just to get it out so you can go back and face it all again. To try and take the wind out of a valid complainer’s sails is, well, it’s just plain mean. So, I say to you, my readers, go forth and complain with style, vent with insight and offer your bemused anecdotes of vexing occurrences (but only like one a day, unless you’re a very interesting person, which you most likely aren’t, as you have time to read my blog). And if somebody tells you not to get your panties in a wad, look them straight in the eyes and tell them “I go commando”.