Yesterday, I decided to give AIM Pages a shot and filled out a basic profile. Apparently, this gave the world permission to randomly IM me. As of early this morning, I have received messages from two (now-blocked) spam bots and had an almost unintelligible conversation with what I assume was an otherwise charming Scotsman.
I don’t mind meeting new people. I really don’t. However, I do have some standards for my online conversations. Scotsman figured this out after I asked him to translate every third line he typed.
I asked him if he spoke English early in the conversation. Later in the conversation, he (a Scotsman) asked me (an American) if his English was really that bad. It wasn’t that his English was bad. In fact, when he elected to type in English, he was really rather gifted with it.
The problem was that he talked in what he called “txtmsg lingo”. I have discovered I have no patience for that language.
I’ve said it in my MySpace profile. I’ll say it here. If I can figure out how to put a text module on my AIM Page, I’ll put it there, too. Feel free to message me, but for the love of God, please don’t contact me if you cannot type in English! I spend an ungodly number of hours a day editing, and I choose not to talk with anyone who forces me to have to sit and try to figure out what they’re saying when I’m not editing.
Moral of the story: If you choose to talk to Rebecca online, please do it in her own language!
