Usually, yes, now that we don’t allow direct insults of posters in titles. But you can’t take the “troll” out of the troll thread without confusing its purpose, so instead we just don’t do direct links from this thread.
This much drama for a first post screams troll to me (and probably sock as well). But TBD I guess.
The troll part is in getting other people invested in their manufactured drama.
I could imagine a random person googling what to do about their situation and finding their way here, so they innocently post their story. Why else would you do it? If you just want to make up a wild yarn and see people react to it, go do it on Reddit. They have plenty of subreddits happy to pretend your creative writing essay is a real problem.
That, I can imagine.
…and finding their way here
That I cannot. But in this case they said they were a long time reader.
Because they’re a sock, of course. A troll covets what it sees.
Ah, I missed that they said they were a long time reader. That does push things in the sock direction, but it’s still feasible (but weird) that they’d be a long-time reader who only just now made an account.
I lurked here for months, maybe a year, before I made an account. I wanted to get a good idea of where I was first.
But was your first post a “Here, let me tell you intimate details of my family life” post?
No; but I generally try not to do that here anyway.
It didn’t seem particularly intimate. All we know (from the OP) is that the poster is married (has a wife, so presumably married to a woman) who is recently unemployed and whose previous boss has issues. No sex, no drugs, no rock n roll.
The bit about the boss demanding the poster’s spouse go pick up the boss’s child from daycare struck me as suspicious. I’d be incredibly surprised if, today, there are any places that will release the child to someone not on the written authorization list.
I’d be totally unsurprised if a great many day in home day care providers don’t follow all the rules and laws.
Especially when an asshole parent is yelling at them on the phone.
That part wasn’t surprising
Live in a small enough town and even the phone call from the parent wouldn’t be necessary, especially if it’s more of a ‘daycare’ that isn’t licensed by the state and run by somebody looking to a few bucks. Everybody literally knows everybody else and lots of businesses aren’t properly licensed
Could this be a troll? Sure. But the details are so …MUNDANE that this would be the most boring troll imaginable.
New thread in IMHO about the phrase “that being said”, started by a poster “matt” I do not recognize. The poster has a hidden profile. Mine antennae are quivering, but linguistic prescriptivists trigger me.
If you’re referring to mattgg, he’s been around a while. Seems ok.
AAAAAAAAA you rotten descriptivist AAAAAAAAAA!!!
Kind of odd, though. Search for posts by them, sort by latest, and there are a slew of posts going back to June 2020 (ok), then nothing for a long time, and then a single post in October of 2003. That’s… questionable.
Maybe not. One post in 2003 – somebody maybe recently online, looking around, didn’t really get into message boards at the time or got into a different one and didn’t come back to this one. June 2020 – remember 2020? Person in isolation looking for something to do, vaguely remembers posting here once, finds the boards again and discovers that now, nearly 20 years later in their life, they are into message board discussion (and/or wherever they’d been doing so in the meantime has become defunct.)
I haven’t noticed the particular person, or checked their posts. But I don’t think the posting pattern you describe is automatically questionable just because of the timing.
Someone creates an account in 2003 to respond to one post they happened to see.
Having completely forgotten that, in 2020 they want to respond to another post they happened to see. They try to create an account and fail because their email address is already in the system.
So they update the password and this time they stick around. In 2023 they open a weird thread, people investigate and “what the Hell?”
Or a very, very committed sock. Like the kind that creates a lot of socks over the years and then dusts off/curates as needed.
Ok. There are three theories in the last three posts. We can each decide for ourselves which is more probable.
If they do something trollish, I’m happy to re-evaluate the probablities.