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Something pretty funny just happened. Thought I'd share.

As a premise, I am by trade a network and software engineer. A son of one of my friends recently started college and is really heavy into the social network scene. To be expected, for sure. I don't know his exact age, but I would put it at close to 20.

He emails me out of the blue and wants to do a phone call to talk through some computer issues he was having. I get this all the time, as you can imagine.

A few minutes into the call, after exchanging pleasantries, we start to sort through his problem. Nothing serious, and it was fixed in short order. Now with the important stuff out of the way, I ask him what's new.

He shared with me a story of how he was having a lot of fun pranking his roommates. He said, and this is nearly a verbatim quote, "So I have been trolling my roommates by repeatedly searching for things like "gay cruise." Since we all share the same WiFi, it will start showing up when they use the internet."

Now, immediately I see a couple of problems here. Not the least is the brutally immature attempt at humor... but he's 20, so I can kinda understand. The second was that it was also obvious just how flawed his plan was.

I asked him if it was working. He said it most certainly was, and when asked for screenshots of his desktop for proof, he happily provided them. I won't post them here out of respect for his privacy, but I can honestly say I have never seen that many ads for gay themed events/places/products on a single screen in my entire life. His facebook page was littered with them.

At this point, I am having a hard time not laughing loudly. I asked him how long he had been doing this. "Several months," he responded. "Well, friend, I have some bad news for you. To start with, you have only managed to troll yourself. This will not affect anyone else at all."

He asked if perhaps clearing out his browsing history and cookies would help. Part of me wishes that I had said "It's all you can do," and ended it there. But I couldn't contain myself.

"You have already convinced the majority of marketing AIs that you are gay. Gay people search for 'gay cruises,' Straight people do not search for 'heterosexual cruises.' Convincing the googles and facebooks of the world you are gay is not something easily done by accident. The only way you can reverse this is to abandon all email and social media accounts and start anew."

(long pause... he doesn't respond, so I continue on) "So when did you first realize you were gay? It's ok. We're friends."

(muffled curse words) He hangs up.

And finally, I can laugh.
 
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