Freethoughtblogs has an email address dedicated to receiving your technical complaints…like, for instance, the annoying outage that occurred earlier today, for several hours. It is also a destination for mythical, cave-dwelling beings depicted in folklore as either a giant or a dwarf, typically having a very ugly appearance, and we also get complaints that are not technical in nature, and therefore not fixable by our usual procedure of kicking the box, or jiggling the wires, or flipping it off and on, or other such arcane rituals of the informational technologists who control our lives. And those non-technical problems fall into my domain.
Here, for example, is a Technical Complaint™ transmitted to us today by one Elliott.
Description of your technical problem: Please let somebody know that the website seems extremely interesting but I have no idea where to start. Just give me the most synthesized “true” “sound” version of all this garbage. 10,000 words or under. I don’t have the time.
Stand back, everyone! I am a trained professional, I can defuse this problem!
Description of your technical answer: I am sorry, Elliott, but you are the one person I cannot help in this case. You see, the reason you found the website so interesting is that we have been talking about you — yes, you personally, Elliott — for several months now. In the absence of actual corrective input from you, this discussion has become increasingly convoluted and inward turning, and there is actually a growing Mythology of Elliott around which a great many apocryphal stories have accreted. I don’t think you’d recognize yourself in the legends. I don’t think you’d want to recognize yourself — the stories are somewhat less than flattering.
You’ve also found it difficult to comprehend because we have developed a cult-like language around the Elliott myth — we can go days in elaborate circumlocutions and strange, ritualistic chanting in which your actual name, Elliott, is not even mentioned, but it’s all about you, in our secret code, and we all know it. Go back to the posts that have you confused, and say to yourself, “This is all about me,” and suddenly it will all seem clear, and the hidden meanings will emerge.
But otherwise, Elliott, I cannot help you. You must cultivate your powers of discernment on your own, and pray that clarity will manifest itself as an emergent property of the text.
But until you have achieved that transcendent lucidity, Elliott, I must ask that you refrain from using the Technical Help email, and instead, fuck off.
First comment I had to this person was ‘lurk more’. (Seriously, who the hell walks up to someone and demands a summary of years of work by multiple people*.)
* Without following it up with the hourly rate or rate by word.
I was going to ask why you didn’t just send him the link to the FTB “About” page, since he was too unobservant to find it himself, but there doesn’t actually appear to be one (or if there is, it’s not linked from the front page).
As you seem to find all manner of garbage extremely interesting, I suggest a visit to your local landfill, a plus being that reading would be optional.
Sounds like the normal pseudo-intelligible gobbledygook that SEO-related comment spam usually contains.
In fact, his name should even not be mentioned orally or in writing. It is the gravest of sins. In writing, we must use the tetragrammaton, “ELTT”, and when spoken we must simply nod and mumble “hmmm-mmm.” So it is written.
I know Elliot. He fancies himself as a brave little soldier in the army of the Lord. He thinks Jesus is watching as he sends sarcastic emails to secular blogs. He thinks Jesus is impressed by his efforts and he thinks he has guaranteed himself a place in heaven. Won’t he get a surprise when he discovers that Jesus hates “yes-men” and heaven is full of atheists while all the Christians go straight to hell. (Trust me. I know about these things)
This guy’s giving us Elliotts a bad name.
PROBLEM: I’m confused by having to think sightly
RESOLUTION: closed. CNR.
For some reason I started imagining this read by the Announcer from The Stanley Parable, with Elliot playing the part of “Raphael”.
“I don’t have time, so please spend several hours of yours to give me a summary!”
The poster boy of entitlement….
Dear Elliott, if you don’t have time, do you have money? Because, you know, for a reasonable fee (about 25 $ an hour) I would be happy to oblige you.
Aww, and there was me imagining that the outage was because you’d riled up the scientologists.
wrt Elliott — I love the fact that, on the Internet, there’s always at least one person [#6] who knows you’re a dog (updated).
I don’t know what your problem is. Go back and read each of my comments on this blog, Elliot, back to the very first one. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of comments I’ve made, I doubt you’ll find more than a handful that exceeded 10,000 words a piece.
I must say I did try and complain that the web site was down but I couldn’t find the address to complain cos the web site was down so I couldn’t look it up.
Please fix this problem immediately!
Giliell@10: I think $25/hour is much too low. You’ll need to add an asshole tax on the fee.
How about: “Be excellent to each other.”
No wait, that was Bill & Ted…
Cheese, advisability of. MUSHROOMS!, advisability of. Peas, inadvisability of. British Industrial Cheddar, extreme inadvisability of. Horses, inadvisability of. Trolls, for keeping ones teeth sniny. Cretinists, thugs, loonitarians, and other reality-challenged eejits, see troll. And moar cheese.
— quoth the mildly deranged penguin.
I wonder if it’s just the immediacy of the Internet which is affecting the perception of gratification, or might earlier generations have had the same problem?
“Dear Count Tolstoy,
Your latest novel contains far too many pages. I could barely even lift it off the bookshelf. If you’d care to send me a precis by return of post, I will consider buying the full edition.”
@17 To be fair, that is a valid response to classic Russian novels. They were long for the sake of being long.