Forum chat is like Clarkson punching you repeatedly in the face

Shouting at bins

A freelance gig I really enjoyed in the last century was being a CompuServe sysop, which meant I moderated chat in a bulletin-board style forum for readers of a computer magazine. It was all great fun with regular readers contributing and talking silly daftness, and but every now and again an Angry Man would pop his head round the forum door and be Angry.

In one instance, we had been talking about the kuh-razy concept of self-driving cars – whatever happened to that idea, I wonder – and I recounted an anecdote concerning a lorry driver with a son who suffered from Down's Syndrome. Apparently no-one could reverse the lorry into a certain narrow drive except for this lad, who somehow had a special understanding of the lorry’s controls and spatial awareness to achieve the feat.

Cue Angry Man. He had never been so disgusted in his life than by what I had written. In fact, he was so offended that he was going to remove himself from the forum forthwith. Before I had any chance to ask him to take off CAPS LOCK, and amid a chorus of other forum members replying “Hang on, pal”, he had vanished as quickly as he had appeared: a veritable ninja of indignation.

It doesn’t take much head-scratching to guess what he might have been angry about, but it was certainly not about something that had actually been said. I’ve worked with Down's Syndrome children and, before retirement, both my parents were in the professional field of mental health. The outburst was evidently a misunderstanding based on Mr Angry’s preconceptions of popular ignorant attitudes towards Down's Syndrome projected on to me.

Scott Adams’s Dilbert totally nailed this guy.

I ought to feel sympathy for these people, but I don’t. They may as well storm to the front of a church at 11.30am on Sunday, fart very loudly and storm off, shouting at the congregation that Marks & Spencer is racist for running out of blue socks in size 11. There’s no logic or relevance behind the thinking of such Major Misunderstanding characters.

Ordinary people think and say stupid things all the time: this is part of human nature. The problem arises when they do it in public and get retweeted. In a decent world, these people would be challenged in an intelligent way and talked down with reason. Instead, Major Misunderstanding barges in, turns it into an adversarial conflict, sends it viral and looks forward to having a nice wank when they read that the shamed parties subsequently lose their jobs or take their own lives.

Back on Facebook, I agree that physical violence is a bad thing in the workplace, apologise to anyone affected by the issues I had raised and quietly leave. It’s best not to get angry. ®