Enjoying A Little Lapse In Integrity

I checked my blog for comments like I do about a couple dozen times every day.  On this particular check I had a comment from a woman who I’ll bastardize her name to be losermommy.  The woman accused me of having all of these aliases and false identities all over the internet and lying to people as well as lying about people.  I was committing fraud and I was purposefully slandering the innocent.  And after she lambasted me she said I didn’t have to bother with replying because she would never come back to my site because if she all she would be doing was wasting her time.  It went on and on and on.  It was a pretty typical of some of the comments I get from some people who don’t care for me or my blog and feel the need to express their detest.

Normally I would do one of two things.  I would make a terse reply refuting all charges if I had the time or, and with more and more frequency the longer I keep writing my blog, I delete such garbage talk without a second thought.  But this time I did something a little different.  I took everything she wrote and replaced it all with “I love your blog” and posted the overly edited comment.

It didn’t take long before I started feeling guilty about what I had done though.  I’m always thinking about integrity of my blog.  If someone didn’t like what I had to say and wanted to let me know how much they didn’t care for me that was their right and it was wrong for me to manipulate my visitor’s comment to make it look like they actually support me when they don’t.  I could delete the comment if I didn’t like it.  But to take what was said and turn it around 180 degrees (not the 360 that people don’t realize is just spinning completely around before returning back to the original direction) wasn’t right.  Not twenty minutes later I was back on my site to delete the comment completely.  Hopefully, no harm would be done.

But I was caught.  Right after I deleted the comment, losermommy was back and she submitted a sequel that was even hotter.  How dare I rewrite her comment!  She hates my blog.  She knew I was a liar.  She would never say that and she demanded I restore her comment in its entirety.  She was a Christian and I was the devil and on and on and on it went.  The indignation was thick.

I could’ve made a reply about how I didn’t care for her original comment and how she promised not to come back and how I decide what gets posted and how I had the right to do whatever and on and on and on I could’ve gone.  But I didn’t.  I took everything she said again and replaced it all with “I really love your blog” and posted losermommy’s second comment.

I really had no intention of leaving this comment on my blog.  But it was truly rare for me to get such immediate gratification from just yanking someone’s chain.  Don’t get me wrong.  Sometimes, although I must admit it gets rarer and rarer, I break my arm patting myself on the back for having a clever reply to a particularly ugly comment from an unruly visitor with poor internet etiquette.  Sometimes it’s gratifying to be able to delete somebody’s comment without even giving the comment a full read.  It’ll be the type of comment that might start with “You won’t post this comment but I think…”  Or it might be something that starts off with a vulgarity and I’ll delete it.  But here I had somebody letting me know that I was getting to them and all it took was a simple sentence of praise.

Twenty minutes later I checked again and again losermommy sent yet a third comment.  “I would never” this and “you will never” that and “anyone who ever comes here” the other, followed up by another “I’m not ever coming back”.  I deleted the previous comment and this time I changed the latest comment to say something like “I really love your blog and it is important that everyone learns to see things from your perspective.”

By now I began to wonder if the woman would ever come to the realization that she would be better off leaving well enough alone instead of making more comments and watching whatever she wrote get more twisted with each submission.  She must’ve wised up because she never submitted another comment.  I let the last one sit for about another half hour before I deleted it and any trace of losermommy from my site.

I threw integrity out the window for an hour and a half or so just so I could screw around with a dumb commenter.  The universe of truth and justice was quickly restored with a click of the delete button.  No harm done except to the peace of mind losermommy might have from submitting her brazenly contemptuous comments and watching helplessly as they got repackaged.

People need to learn that the anonymity of the internet is not an invitation to be nasty and indignant, especially when visiting other people’s website.  I’m sure you can get your point across without sounding like a wicked harpy.  If losermommy wants to write something particularly nasty about me on her own website then she’s more than entitled.  There’s nothing I can do to stop her.  But I’ll be damned if I let her or anyone else come here to ruthlessly criticize me.  You’re more than welcome to come here and disagree.  All I ask is that you act like you want your input to the conversation heard instead of acting like you want your comments thrown out.