The Nice People Thread, No.16: A Universe of Niceness.

Cakeguts

Pyxis wrote: »

Cakeguts..... not a very pleasant experience for you at all.

I can't say I have experienced cyber-bullying as such, but in my very early days on MSE, I made a jokey remark on a chat thread in the Arms which didn't mean anything and had no subtext, it was just a jokey remark, but someone took agin it, and implied I was being very rude, when I wasn't. I couldn't understand at all why it was taken as rude, but I apologised anyway and asked them more than once to explain what I had said that was rude, but they never did.
I was so upset, I logged off and didn't log back on again for about three weeks, and then only because someone was asking where I was.

(I still, to this day, don't understand why they thought I was being rude! )

What I have discovered is that they don't have a reason for calling you rude other than they want to. It seems to be strangely like bullies anywhere they pick someone to have a go at. How they choose that person I don't know. They wouldn't have only read that one post you made they had probably been looking at what you and others were writing over a period of time waiting for a chance to have a go at someone and they picked you. Lucky you.

I think from my experience of this that the jokey comment was nothing to do with anything at all and it might be anything that anybody said anywhere else on that chat that set them off. You didn't get an explanation for why they thought it was rude because there wasn't one.

I am sorry that you were so upset by the incident. It isn't nice and it was nothing at all to do with the jokey comment. It does take a while to realise that the problem isn't you.

There was an incident on the site where the most recent set of bullying happened that went like this. ( It was an international site). A young person from another country not the UK (you could tell by the terminology) asked a question about a piece of musical equipment that was not working for them as well as they would have liked. They wanted confirmation that it was normal for this to happen because this is what a lot of people had been telling them about this particular brand. I had the same brand and so I could confirm that this was what I understood tended to happen with this brand and all you needed to do was upgrade that piece of equipment and the rest would be fine. I could understand why they were annoyed because the upgrade cost me something like £500.

In the middle of this discussion a regular poster on the site jumped in and told me that the fact that I needed an upgrade was my fault and basically I should have realised that this might happen and I should not have bought this equipment if it didn't work very well. (My fault not the manufacturers.) There were two problems with this. One was that the equipment was supplied as a set and the second one was at that time I didn't have anything to compare it to because for me it was a new thing. So in a stroke they managed to tell me I was an idiot and not only that but by implication the young person in the other country was one as well. They then went on to tell me that they had bought their equipment from the official UK dealer which happened to be local and by implication if I had got mine from there I wouldn't have had the problem.

You can probably guess where this is going by now? I knew exactly where they had got their equipment from because that was the same shop mine came from. Not only that but I couldn't quite see how this helped the person in another country who asked the original question and who could have been anywhere in the world from some country in Europe to some country in South America who now basically understood by implication that they should have bought their equipment from the UK official dealer in order to try to avoid a problem that is considered normal and isn't really a problem because everyone knows about it. Except of course the person who had jumped in to tell me I was an idiot.

I finished up trying to smooth this over so that the person in the other country didn't feel bad. That incident was the last straw for that group. I don't get paid for working in international relations so I am not going to spend time doing it.

GDB2222

LydiaJ wrote: »

What I want to know is, is there any way to dictate text messages into an android phone so that they have punctuation in them? I quite often want to send messages of more than one sentence. Do any of the NP have any insight?

That's what I'm doing! (Except it comes out as "That's what I'm doing exclamation mark".)

According to the Internet, it helps if you do not pause between dictating the last word and dictating the punctuation. So, it all has to come out in a big rush.

Jackmydad

Cakeguts wrote: »

What I have discovered is that they don't have a reason for calling you rude other than they want to. It seems to be strangely like bullies anywhere they pick someone to have a go at. How they choose that person I don't know. They wouldn't have only read that one post you made they had probably been looking at what you and others were writing over a period of time waiting for a chance to have a go at someone and they picked you. Lucky you.

I think from my experience of this that the jokey comment was nothing to do with anything at all and it might be anything that anybody said anywhere else on that chat that set them off. You didn't get an explanation for why they thought it was rude because there wasn't one.

I am sorry that you were so upset by the incident. It isn't nice and it was nothing at all to do with the jokey comment. It does take a while to realise that the problem isn't you.

There was an incident on the site where the most recent set of bullying happened that went like this. ( It was an international site). A young person from another country not the UK (you could tell by the terminology) asked a question about a piece of musical equipment that was not working for them as well as they would have liked. They wanted confirmation that it was normal for this to happen because this is what a lot of people had been telling them about this particular brand. I had the same brand and so I could confirm that this was what I understood tended to happen with this brand and all you needed to do was upgrade that piece of equipment and the rest would be fine. I could understand why they were annoyed because the upgrade cost me something like £500.

In the middle of this discussion a regular poster on the site jumped in and told me that the fact that I needed an upgrade was my fault and basically I should have realised that this might happen and I should not have bought this equipment if it didn't work very well. (My fault not the manufacturers.) There were two problems with this. One was that the equipment was supplied as a set and the second one was at that time I didn't have anything to compare it to because for me it was a new thing. So in a stroke they managed to tell me I was an idiot and not only that but by implication the young person in the other country was one as well. They then went on to tell me that they had bought their equipment from the official UK dealer which happened to be local and by implication if I had got mine from there I wouldn't have had the problem.

You can probably guess where this is going by now? I knew exactly where they had got their equipment from because that was the same shop mine came from. Not only that but I couldn't quite see how this helped the person in another country who asked the original question and who could have been anywhere in the world from some country in Europe to some country in South America who now basically understood by implication that they should have bought their equipment from the UK official dealer in order to try to avoid a problem that is considered normal and isn't really a problem because everyone knows about it. Except of course the person who had jumped in to tell me I was an idiot.

I finished up trying to smooth this over so that the person in the other country didn't feel bad. That incident was the last straw for that group. I don't get paid for working in international relations so I am not going to spend time doing it.

Some people just go around looking for a row, or for a chance to belittle someone.
If they're like that in real life, which I extremely doubt, then they must be extremely hard nosed, and very interesting to go drinking with. :eek:

I try not to spend any time at all even thinking about them. It gives them some sort of credence.
Don't let 'em get you down.

silvercar

On an iphone, dictating punctuation works well, it is the words that come out wrong.

Pyxis

Good morning from sunny (still dark!) Gatwick!
Off to Italy this morning!:

GDB2222

PasturesNew wrote: »

No lead/spare.


You're not allowed to do that. All items, once at the tip, belong to the Council, you're not allowed to lurk/approach people for stuff. There's even a sign limiting how long you're allowed to lurk near the "items for sale" section (which I always drive slowly past, but usually is full of quite shabby/broken stuff).



I belong to 3-4 of those groups, there's rarely anything at all offered - and it's often most likely to be "bag of rubble" or something equally useless

You are right that there are signs telling you not to approach people for stuff, but that need not put you off. The very very worst that can happen is that a brightly dressed bloke will ask you politely to desist.

I don't do things that are illegal or immoral, but I don't think that recycling working TVs in a recycling centre is either of those.

PasturesNew

Pyxis wrote: »

... Italy ...

Posh alert!

I might make it as far as the garden

GDB2222

Pyxis wrote: »

Good morning from sunny (still dark!) Gatwick!
Off to Italy this morning!:

Italy is lovely. The Italians are lovely. Lucky you. :j

SingleSue

Ex hubby used to say I was a pessimist when in fact I was and still am more of a realist. Things can and do go wrong and it is better to be prepared for that than be shocked and totally unprepared if things do.

So I hope for the best but plan for the worse as a contingency hence why I don't just have a plan A for when things go swimmingly but several other plans too just in case they don't.

Joe took his final exam on Wednesday, he had been so nervous about this exam as the last one he had had in this module had not been very nice and it had bashed his confidence a little. He needn't have worried, he scored a very high 2.1.

Even more impressive bearing in mind that since his SATS he has taken exams away from the main group due to an inability to cope with exam taking noises, he took the exam in the main hall alongside 300 other students and didn't freak out (that was one of the issues with the previous module exam), as this time he was prepared for it, got there early and got a seat on the edge where there was more space around him and he could hear road noise to distract from the (to him) painful noises of pens scratching on paper.

Mind you, to help him with the revision he wanted me to set a test for him the night before the exam. 300+ pages of lecture slides were sent to me to do so, also the afternoon before the exam so I had to sit down, read through every single slide and set questions in a very short space of time.

It helped him though as I chose bits from all over the place, set questions on obscure facts and some of these actually featured in the exam itself.

silvercar

Well done SingleSue, your boys success is down to your perseverance.