Today was tiring. I sat down to relax when a stranger with 4 Facebook men like me as “friends”.

I am rude to strangers. I think as men we need to normalize the idea of being rude to strangers. Let me clarify and qualify that because I don’t actually like being rude to anyone. It’s just so hard to be polite to creeps and scammers. It’s a waste of time unless I make it fun. Being rude to strangers makes it more fun.

However, these days strangers are not the same as they once were. A long time ago a stranger wasn’t suspicious. A stranger didn’t want to steal from you or to con you or to try and make you fall in love with them so that you pay their bills. Those people existed, and we may have been countered them, but it wasn’t the expected norm when meeting a stranger. 

You were certainly right to teach your children not to talk to strangers and be suspicious of people doing suspicious things but today saying hello is very suspicious. As a man online, women say hello to me a lot. Compared to my real life where I’m not sure a strange woman has ever said hello to me just out of the blue, it happens an alarmingly amount online. 

Sometimes they’re obviously fake. For example the women who say hello gorgeous or hello handsome right off the bat I can rule out. Especially when those greetings come from apps that don’t share a picture. Why would anyone with half a brain say hello gorgeous to a blank identification on a website. I can also rule out the people who say hello darling because I don’t think anyone has used that phrase since 1970. 

But most of them just start with hay or hello. I’m blogging now because one just did. A random stranger from Facebook saying hello. And then after some coaxing I get more than one word. Let me share a few with you here and keep in mind, I am not this rude to people I know or people in person. Just to people who follow along a script with copy and paste answers using all the keywords I’ve come to recognize.

First off, I want to say that I use voice to text to type most of the time and I know the correct your even if my voice to text translator doesn’t. Second of all you should know that there was at least 5 minutes between each of her messages and I’m familiar enough with a German accent using English as a second language and it doesn’t sound like the way she types. Plus when you use trust that early in a sentence it’s a key red flag. I find most people don’t use the word trust very often these days. It’s an outdated concept sadly. 

Anyway she stopped responding. I’m surprised she stayed that long. Although I suspect in the next week or two she will start all over again as if that conversation never happened. Textbook. 

I had one interesting chat with a lady I think I might even put it on my blog because she stuck with me for 3 weeks or more on and off in chat despite the fact that I kept telling her I knew she wasn’t real and that this was her 9:00 to 5 job or maybe in her country 9:00 to 9:00 or whatever crazy hours they allow. Just sitting in an office somewhere with 40 other people chatting with Americans or in my case at Canadian. He could tell when you’d stump her because she’d have to go off to the textbook or her supervisor to ask how to respond. And as long as you got back on the script it didn’t matter how many times you told her that you knew she was scamming or trying to. I suspect they get points or extra money or at least praise for keeping the customer online that long. Customer might not be the right term 

Anyway this one proved not to be fun enough to continue I guess.