Saturday, July 16, 2011

We need a chat, you and I.

My Social Network tolerance for you is wearing thin. I almost feel guilty about doing this, but we’re going to have to part company. It’s not you – it’s me. Actually no, fuck that. It’s 100% you. Absolutely all down to you. “You should be more patient”, my conscience mumbles, but it’s beaten down by my atrophied patience gland which now resembles nothing more than a withered and blackened Goji Berry.

Is it about that time you clicked on that racist link, you ask? I forgave you for doing that, didn’t I? It was just a silly misunderstanding, that’s what we agreed. You told me you didn’t actually agree with the bile being spouted on that abhorrent page, but you just liked the sound of the title of it. You thought it was funny. We laughed about your silly naivety and we put that whole episode behind us. I’d hoped we could move on, but I had my doubts even then.

Tell me, you plead, was it when I spammed your page with posts about ‘You’ll never believe what this girl does on her webcam!’, ‘This girl dyed (sic) live on Webcam!’ or ‘Facebook is going to start charging for you to use it’? No, I smile. But you can tell from my expression that I might not be telling you the truth. You can see visible signs of doubt - that this relationship, after all these years, might be approaching its natural conclusion.

All these things add up, you see. But I can put some of them down to your inexperience with computers, or your complete inability to not believe everything you read in the tabloids. Or perhaps, at the end of the day, you’re just fucking stupid. Perhaps you think all Muslims should be sent back, but you’d never admit it to me – because you know I’d disapprove. Perhaps you genuinely believe that all these viruses your friends warn you about are genuine – your intentions may have been pure. You just need a bit of educating into how useful a tool Google is, I guess.

But these things all add up, you see.

It’s your complete inability to use the English language that bothers me.

We have a glorious language at our disposal, with evocative words and sophisticated turns of phrase and plenty of space to use them in. Hell, I could even partly forgive your poorly worded nonsense if it were in an SMS message or maybe even Twitter, but in the medium in which I read your words in you really have no excuse. And, to be frank, there's a big difference between genuine dyslexia and a complete ignorance when it comes to our beautiful language.

I firmly believe if you don't understand apostrophes and can't be bothered to learn them, it makes more sense for you not to use them at all. Your poorly written scrawl offends both my eyes and my sensibilities. And, in all honesty, are the words "you" and "mate" so long and complex that you feel the need to abbreviate them? Many of your outpourings are so illegible that I'd need an Enigma machine to decrypt them into something readable. Your posts sometimes resemble nothing more than random hexadecimal, and I can't be bothered to decode them - because it'll only be something that I'm not interested in anyway.

We can still be friends. There will always be a special place in my heart for you, but I think it's time that we need to start seeing other people.

1 comment:

I love comments. Love 'em. However, abusive or spam or Anonymous ones may well be sent straight to the bin. Thems the rules.