I'm Lindsay Ferrier, a Nashville writer with a passion for family travel, exploring Tennessee, and raising kids without losing my mind in the process. This is where I share my discoveries, along with occasional deep thoughts, pop culture tangents and a sprinkling of snark. Want to get in touch? Use the CONTACT form at the top of the page.
January 31, 2011
>Over the weekend, I noticed an unusual amount of traffic on my site.
I couldn’t tell exactly what was prompting it, but I did notice a whole bunch of searches for “Fashionable Single Girls.” Weird.
A tiny bit detective work led me to an ‘etiquette’ message board, where someone had pasted a post called “An Open Letter to Fashionable Single Girls Who Spoil My Dinner,” which I wrote three years ago. At the time, I had been seeing a number of diatribes on the Internet from the ‘child-free’ against (their term) breeders who dared to bring their sniveling brats into public places, where adults might have to see or hear them and thus have their dinner/shopping trip/doctor’s appointment totally spoiled.
In response, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter based on an experience that had happened to me. In short, I described those very special adults who give my kids dirty looks for existing, even though- like most parents- we only take our kids to family-friendly establishments, the children do a good job of behaving themselves, and we’re all clearly doing the best we can.
The post generated plenty of discussion at the time, and it was having the same effect on the message board, where what appeared to be a small group of losers with nothing better to do on a Saturday than sit behind their computers and come up with insults… did just that.
And far from being outraged or wounded, I thought it was hilarious. I mean, is there any dumber, less fruitful way to waste your time than by inventing things you’d like to say to a woman who wrote a parenting blog post three years ago? Many of their responses were very elaborate, too. Clearly they’d really spent some time on their words– words that they thought I’d never even see, since my post wasn’t actually linked- it was just copied and pasted.
But finally, after several pages of tripe, one of the lugheads managed to find a link to my site and triumphantly post it.
And that led me to do what I hope you’ll consider doing should this kind of thing ever happen to you. I made a slight adjustment to the original post, which they of course, were eagerly clicking on in order to read it for themselves. Check it out here.
Yes, friends. This is how I troll.
(I temporarily moved the original post to this spot so that you can read it if you’d like. You know I’m not going to leave you hanging!)
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