molly.com
Saturday 7 April 2007
Stupid Things You’ve Done Online
It’s confession time again, and time for a little leverage. I can always put leverage to good use, as gravity seems to delight in having its way with me.
Physics aside, here are three of the stupidist things I’ve ever done online:
- Drunk IMing/Emailing. This is an extension of “drunk n’ dial.” For those unfamiliar, you have had a lot to drink and are probably alone and looking for someone to rant to. So you begin to call, or in this case, IM or Email your friends. You wake up the next day thinking “Oh god, who do I have to apologize to” and scanning your outbox for faux pas and crimes against others. A common stupid activity.
- Sent the WRONG Attachment. To the wrong person. You know, like the sexy video you made your last boyfriend ends up in your boss’s inbox. Oops.
- Wrong Person Conversations. This is when someone IM’s you and you’re sure you know who it is, so you go about having a conversation, perhaps even a complete personal discussion, and then find out the person wasn’t who you thought they were. Oh my.
Okay, your turn!
Filed under: blogging, humor, pop culture, society
Posted by: Molly | 13:02 | Comments (45)
Not personal experience or anything, right?
@Robin, does it count if your last boyfriend was your boss? :: rimshot ::
Well, I just (a few seconds ago) sent a link about bisexuality to a friend instead of a recent bit of writing of mine. That isn’t overly bad because I’m openly bisexual (though my sexuality is unrelated to why I had it open), but I’ve made similar (far worse) mistakes such as sending a link about same sex bestiality with heterosexual humans…
Angry and hurt blogging. Don’t forget that.
Angry and hurt blogging can also be very well written and honest though, it isn’t always bad (though it normally is).
And Wow! I actually got a comment held for moderation here :p
The dumbest thing I’ve done online, and recently decided to stop doing is;
Attempting to make casual/business contact/connections with “colleagues” that obviously have some sort of aversion to responding, due to a preconceived notion that I might somehow be beneath them and therefore unworthy of their precious time.
@geoffrey: yeah, but that’s because you’re talking about bestiality. That word actually is on my filter list. I don’t mind adult conversation here. But.
@Laura: A given, hence this post.
@James: That makes me feel guilty because I have thousands of unanswered email from people I want to talk to. But I hear what you’re saying. It sucks to be ignored.
Well, I once tried to hit on a girl, only to find I was actually IMing with the girl I was steadily dating at the time. They both had the same given name, so it took a while before she called me on it, too… So for the next couple of months, I started every conversation with a control question…
I also filed a job-application (luckily not an important one, though) with the name of the firm misspelled via e-mail. I didn’t get an interview.
Ouch Twisted Intellect! That hurts. Played twice by the same girl. Not cool.
I hope yer better now
@Molly, sorry that wasn’t directed at you, specifically.
twitter
I would say buying things from unknown businesses without checking out their BBB rating. I’ve lost quite a bit of money looking for a good deal online.
Online dating. Whether through some dating website or virtually in an MMPORPG (do you Arkaos the Orc take Glenda the Fairy-elf to be your wench?) — it always turns out bad.
I actually submitted a resume with a misspelled word in the first sentence. It was pretty blatant, but I still managed to get the job.
I’d say the worst thing I did was forgetting to delete test data from a website I released to a client. Normally it wouldn’t have been a big deal, but some of the data was entered during some stressful moments and had some very colorful grammar.
I’m enjoying vodka and cranberry right now, and the most embarrassing thing I’m doing is misspelling vodka as vodca.
I’d have to go with drunk e-mailing as the biggie stupid thing I’ve done online.
Writing badly on a weblog, of course, is another one.
Which is kind of an unavoidable hazard that comes with blogging (although it’s one that present company evades deftly). I don’t really think people will hold my ramblings against me (or anyone else).
Besides, I’d rather people judge me for my crimes than for my mistakes.
‘Drunk IMing/Emailing’
hehehe, yeah, done that a couple of times before! Apologies to those dozen or so former friends!! :s
How about drunk HTML/CSS/JavaScript coding. I dare you to try this one. When your sober it’s hilarious to see what you have done. It’s a challenge to get past typing the Doctype and meta tags though!
Forgive me, Molly, for I have sinned.
I think the worst thing that I have ever done on the net, other than writing an advert for an ex on a lonely hearts site (it read: bearded transvestite seeks similar for bristly good times) just to get back at them for breaking up with me, is that I created and hosted an IRC channel called “the kitchen confessional”.
I greeted my chat channel guests with the line “do you have anything to confess?”. And they did confess. All sorts of things. Most of which cannot be mention on this site. Good taste does not allow such descriptions.
The channel lasted two evenings before I finally listened to my conscience and got back on my moral horse.
Eek! If only I still had the logs, what a novel I could write.
@ian You know, they still talk about that at hatchling today… I still blame the PM for not checking it.
I think the worst thing I have ever done was accidentally sending the invoice for one of our contractors to a client instead of the accountant (stupid auto-filled in email address!)The client then realized how much of a slice we were getting per an hour for “management”, atleast it was for another agency- I’m sure their slice was larger!
Two hours before a career-defining deadline, I laid out a form with a table because my CSS skillz had left me due to no sleep. And posting a nudie picture of myself by mistake.
I once accidentally sent a NSFW attachment (photo of a naked FOAF I found on a computer I was fixing) to a friends work email address, instead of her personal address, and it was caught by the departments filters and passed around the office. She finally found out about it when a girl from PR asked for the number of ‘hot naked email guy’ the next week.
I do a lot of stupid things online.I think this takes the cake though:http://www.jasongraphix.com/archive/2006/01/numa_numa
Dateline: New York, New York. 09 April 07 The Wall Street Journal
CBS Corporation and Worldwide Pants have just announced a new addition to the David Letterman Show, “Stupid Online Human Tricks”. It was reported that Sumner Redstone, one of the originating private venture capitalists in “America Online”, is negotiating with Time Warner to include AOL content into the new Letterman segment. Redstone was quoted as saying, “The Internet has substantiated Darwin’s Theory of Evolution — in reverse.”
@ Dave: actually, you’re still wrong. it’s spelled ‘wodka’. trust a half-slavonic guy
cu, w0lf.
Oh yea… I’ve done a couple … answering someone — a personal email where you say more than you want others to read publically — only to find it was written from a list you both belong to and your answer is now in the public archives! :-O
And the freakin’ autofill email address thing has bit me in the butt — at least once. The worst was when it autofilled a list I had just joined instead of one of my best friends. But I can’t talk about that one. Still too embarrassing.
Drunken IMing? Hmmm…maybe … I don’t keep my transcripts. heh
I absolutely NEVER do anything stupid online
(this roughly translates as “I do, but can’t think of an amusing example right now.)
However a graphic designer I was working with once tested the site we were working on on his home computer (this was 2 years ago, he still had OS9 and netscape 3… looooser !
) and did me a screenshot so I could have see how it looked.
Except he didn’t think to crop it or to hide his bookmarks in the personal bar at the top, and I got a glimpse of his favorite sites. “Hardcore sex” was probably the funniest
A few years ago I coded a PHP backend, using a class var switch for debugging things going on at runtime. The switch was a member var of my common base class, and thus each time some ordinary action took place PHP sent me an email to my freemailer account. Yet the first runtime I topped the ten thousand mails (nested loops, hrhr), and it took me some F5 pressed (webdevelopment at 4am, hrhr) until I realized what was going on….
It took 10 hours fetching my mail (dial-up modem, hrhr) and 10 minutes explaining to both my webhosting and email provider…
I sent a drunk email once that gained legendary status among the people who received it. Over confidence in communicating with people you don’t know very well paid off for once!
Still, I’m sure I’ve written emails/IMs that I can’t remember that had the opposite effect. Thankfully I can’t remember them!
I applied for the same job at the same company twice, once. In a timespan of 3 or 4 weeks.
Isn’t weird all of us have or do something bad
Ill-advised, drunken emailing is something I do much more often than I’d like. And when I do, I always wake up the next morning thinking “Oh my God, what did I send!”. But I’m afraid to look at my Sent box to see what I actually sent. Usually, it’s not that bad but sometimes it is. I’ve finally resorted to taping a note to my monitor that says “DO NOT send email if you’ve had a drink!” which seems to help a little bit.
Sending emails to my client with out subject/ wrong subject line.
Mixing up IM messages when chatting with more people
ermm….hi!
can everyone ignore my last comment as i had more than a few scoops before i wrote it.
ta
i upload my website http://www.designersyard.com and http://www.rent-your-website.org without checking my design in old browser like ie6 so the results is a mess.
[...] Molly asks What stupid things have you done online. Shoot over and give her your confession. [...]
Stalking people, I’m wayy too inquisitive, it’s kinda weird all the things you can find online anyways.
[...] Molly.com’s post about stupid things done online [...]
Stupidest/worst/funniest/most interesting thing I ever did was tell my boyfriend I love him online only to find out later that I put it in the wrong instant message window!… the person who responded was a friend of mine who liked me a lot and, apparently wasn´t surprised when I said ¨I love you¨. I had to have an awkward talk with this person, but we ended up very close after my break up.
thanks
Yes. The weekend my husband went away to his 30th H.S. reunion, I apparently drunk e-mailed someone I thought I longed to see again simply because I saw his business listed online. WRONG move.
I went on about how I never forgot him, can’t get him off of my mind. I didn’t remember doing it the next day. I was MORTIFIED to find that message in my “out” box.
Problem is, he and his significant other could probably trace the e-mail to where I live. I am TRULY not a stalker. Wish him well. I think it was a matter of too much wine and my husband being away at his 30th reunion that sparked that.
Yes, I feel remorse. Only hope this guy will hit his delete button or forgive me.