Have you ever caught yourself reading a thread that you don’t understand? Me, I just spent the last half hour over at this pit thread about programming abominations. I’ve been reading this thread for 30 minutes and I don’t know a damn thing about programming! For some reason, I was engrossed in this collective bitchfest even though virtually every post was gibberish. Perhaps I loathe actual work so much I find excuses such as this to put it off? Who knows.
I’m going to find something interesting to click on.
I find myself doing that all the time. Sometimes I’ll keep reading, in hope that I will learn something. Other times I just shake my head and think, well, at least I don’t have to worry about X!
The ones that irk me are the ones where the OP is clear in his/her position, and yet someone comes along and hijacks the thread or picks out one word and takes issue with it. And another thread bites the dust… Very annoying. But this is in itself a hijack of sorts, so I’ll shut up.
I do that sometimes, too. I also sometimes find myself bleary-eyed at the end of the work week, clicking around four different open tabs. I’ll click back to the SDMB and find the thread, “The Gilmore Girls’ effect on African tribesmen” or something else I have absolutely zero interest in, and wonder “what in Og’s name drove me to click that in the first place?!” Sometimes I’ll even have scrolled down a few pages, yet have no recollection of a single word in the thread.
Just last week I spent quite a while trying to make sense of this thread on accrual accounting before I finally realized that I wasn’t really learning anything and should probably move on.
I know exactly what you mean. This one time, I found myself reading a thread about a guy who didn’t know why he was reading a thread about programming abominations, and I had to ask myself why…
I have to say this somewhere. After reading the OP of this thread three times, I was dangerously close to being the first to respond with the following post:
A good argument for staying out of threads where I don’t belong.
I read math questions in GQ. Stuff like “Help me analyze the differential hypotenuse in this astronomical physics calculation.”
I’m good at simple math but anything past Algebra II confuses the hell out of me. But I read the threads anyway, just to marvel at the nerdiness of the people who do respond. I think it’s like nerd porn for me.