The Troll

Sigh...Yeah, I guess there's one at every blog. But this one has a back story that I might as well share. Nutshell version is this:

I'm a regular poster on a message board that consists of Writers Guild members. Most of the posters there are kind, witty, helpful, incredibly smart, gifted writers, many of whom I am proud to call my friends. The majority of them, myself included, are also politically liberal, which has led to many a bitter political argument when one of the conservatives makes his/her case. Most of the time, it's a perfectly civil disagreement that gradually peters out. But naturally, because it's the internet, the board also attracted a serious devoted and demented troll whose stated goal was to be contrarian, to insult everyone else, to cause trouble, to basically be, as a colleague put it, the turd in the punch bowl.

His typical M.O. would be to regurgitate a pile of wildly extreme right-wing views and talking points that he didn't even believe for the sole purpose of creating havoc and disrupting conversations, and when these hysterics would be invariably dismantled with simple logic, common sense, and facts, he would quickly resort to name-calling and profanity, his mouth getting frothier and frothier until he finally melted down to such a degree that he'd say something so outrageously horrible and inappropriate that he'd get banned from the board for a while. Then he'd come back, not the least bit humbled, start posting his ravings again, and the cycle would start anew.

But his last visit to the board, several months ago, topped them all, when he tried to show off his bona fides as a "journalist" while arguing with someone who actually DID have years of experience as a journalist. He did so by posting a press release about his having won a large monetary award for his financial journalism articles online. The only problem? The award didn't exist, the entity giving the award didn't exist, and the day of the week listed in the "press release" that the award was supposedly given to him on did not match the actual day of the week that the date fell on.

In other words, dude was so pathetically desperate to make his point, and so cheerfully willing to be completely dishonest about it, that he invented an award for himself and concocted a phony press release about it.

So naturally, because it was so transparently phony that it took about two seconds of research to reveal it as such, he was outed as, on top of being a miserable troll, a blatant liar. Yet he continued to post, despite now having gambled away what little credibility he'd had left and was now basically the laughingstock of the board.

So he continued blathering his nonsense, and I and others continued rebutting him at every turn, never forgetting to remind him of the phony journalist award debacle (which he never even bothered to defend or explain), so he started issuing "warnings" to me to leave him alone...until he finally revealed what lay in store for me for not heeding his dire warnings: A blog post he'd written elsewhere (he has since deleted it) that called me out as a "cyber-stalker", took a bunch of baseless potshots at me, and somewhere in there mentioned that he had a gun, the implication being a pretty strong one that he intended to shoot me if I continued "stalking" him.

Well, the moderators of our message board didn't take too kindly to one of the members making what was essentially a death threat against another, so they banned him for an extensive period this time, and that's how it's been, and the board is all the better for his absence, and I went right on living my life.

And now...he's here.

Cats and kittens, meet I Lost the Nest Egg's most prolific commenter: "Karen".

Oh, make no mistake, it's him. He's denied it, of course, but judging from the instantly recognizable stylistic touches (the high school logic, the baseless potshots, the insulting tone, the crude sexual analogies, the insistence that I'm wasting my time responding to him (on the old board, he would ridicule anyone with a high post count) the use of LOL's (he's big on emoticons too), the begging me to delete his posts (on the old board he would constantly beg anyone he argued with to "Put me on IGNORE!")), and the fact that there's simply no one else in the world who would go to this much trouble to try to demean me in the way that "Karen" is trying, I would happily swear on a thousand Bibles that it's my old buddy.

Anyway, that's the back story behind all these "Karen" posts. I've deleted a few of them because they consisted almost entirely of potshots and served no purpose other than to stink up the joint, but I'm going to leave the lion's share of them up, because they so beautifully illustrate the sort of inanity I spent countless hours at various day jobs demolishing.

Oh, also, as you read them and take in all the cartoonishly nasty comments about my career and the "schooling" of me he's doing on how the business works and ridiculing me for embarking on a career outside the industry?

Keep in mind: This dude runs a payday loan company and spends much of his time lately blogging in defense of the wondrous world of payday loans. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course (well, actually many would argue that there's PLENTY wrong with payday loans, but that's for another day), in fact, more power to him for finding an alternative line of work, since apparently the writing thing didn't pan out too well for him. It's just not really helping his case against MY career all that much.

So...fun's fun, "Karen", but I think you've worn out your welcome here at I Lost the Nest Egg.

And anyway, don't you have some more journalism awards to win?