“Life is beautiful when you have the right family, the right people, and friends around you. I know you don’t know me, but I hope you know that every good friend you have today was once a stranger. Sometimes we meet someone new and feel like we’ve known them all our lives. I must admit I love every post you have on your blog and you seem like a good woman who would make a good friend. Can we be friends I tried several times to send you a request but it didn’t go through so I decided to leave a comment here. Click on my profile and send me a friend request. Thank you and my best wishes.”

It was this sub comment that appeared attached to a comment that I made on a rather serious posting on social media. To say that I was surprised that somebody took over the thread of the original poster is an understatement, a concept that continues to surprise and somewhat delight me. It surprises me in the fact that I still am naïve enough to think that everybody on social media is straight shooter, and it also delights me that there is an innocence alive in me still.

That being said, I also thought it a bit rude. How dare the unknown person, also a man, comment on how he wants to be my friend. Doesn’t that sort of activity belong in the realm of “sliding into my DM‘s“? Can’t this individual see that I am listing my status is married? Don’t they know that I am not by nature, an ostentatiously flirtatious person? Surely if they had read my posts, they should know this right?

Of course, then I had to examine myself thoroughly on the inside. I thought yet again, how naïve of me. (Also, secretly, how stick in the mud and old-fashioned of me!) Not everybody has good intention on the Internet, or even a moral filter. Social media has become the land of the “keyboard warrior“ and what my grandma would call“the armchair general”. She used this moniker to describe my grandfather when he would mansplain, not knowing the term at the time.

So yet again, I had a good surprise and delight at myself.

Not long after this incident, I received a text from a person that I did not know that was asking me via text, to be their personal friend. By this time, I had thoroughly researched the use of AI entities in the marketing stratosphere and I had learned that they use the soft predatory tactics to suck people into their product, their service, or just to fork over dollars. Also, I saw a picture of a young person of Asian descent, poised, tapping phones, dozens, and dozens of phones, mounted on a wall. Marketing and broadcasting the same phrase over and over and over and over again.

So, instead of getting upset at this point, I simply texted back to the individual “ if you are being held against your will working in a trapped environment, being forced to text all day long, please comment on this picture, and I will do my best to help you escape.” in my correspondence, I included that picture that I found online of the young individual texting repeatedly.

Sadly, nobody texted me back. I would’ve gladly helped any individual that really actually needed help to escape such a thing. In the end, the benefit came to me that I did not have to go to great lengths to block this number, or to have an endless conversation to get me off of a phone list, or any other blocking activities. They simply did not answer and they went away.

I hope at some point that they can have an actual lunch break and get some sleep.