The Net and the Nutcase
By Jawad and Sarah
Once upon a time, in an IP address far, far numerical to remember, there lived a girl whose face was very symmetrical and pleasing to the eye. She lived happily with her papa and mama and her little brother. Her papa loved her very much and gave her access to internet by providing the bills. The girl, let's call her Yfritta, loved her papa for it.
“Oh papa, how nice the internet is! Look, here is how our house looks from the sky! And look, I have searched my name on this place called Google! Wow, right? And look at this cat. Isn't it meowrvellous?” she said to her papa, who smiled and took his leave from this tale.
One day, Yfritta found herself a little place of joy in the vast world of the internet. There was this website where they let you put all your personal information in and they let you make friends with people you don't know. Yfritta thought it was so cool! Because now she can have so many friends besides the ones she is already friends with. So, Yfritta joins the community.
Next were some months of joy and playfulness. There was so much to do that didn't need her to get up from her bed, or study for her chemistry test. She expressed her dissatisfaction at the oil-price, commented “OMG <4 evr” on her friend's shared link and “liked” a photo that will have saved 10 million children in Africa from meningitis. In short, Yfritta was very much a “digital” girl in a “digital” world. Liking plastic, it was fantastic.
But happiness doesn't last forever. In Yfritta's pixelated skies appeared the dark smudges of an online entity. And like every other splotch, it began with a tiny dot. The guy (of course he was a guy, it is proven that guys are villainous) starts with a normal, simple request for friendship. And then came the inevitable first post:
“Hey thnx 4 da add. I wanna frandshp wid u :P”
Yfritta didn't mind, of course, for this was the everyday peril of a girl on the internet. She let it slide and almost forgot about it for the next 10 seconds, until she started getting more and more inboxes. By the same guy.
Yfritta was a good girl, but she set her patience a limit, stretching to mild grammar and use of punctuation. The creepy guy made Yfritta wonder about the futility of education and ethics in modern times. So a day came when Yfritta could no longer strain her brain to decode an extremely net lingo worded message and reported the guy and blocked him. This broke the guy.
So, he prayed and prayed to the Twitter Fairy so that she would swing her magic wand and grant him infinite numbers of twitter accounts. Thus, started the journey of Anonto (we forgot to mention his name in the seriousness of the story) and his countless tweets at Yfritta and all her friend. After getting eleven accounts blocked by Yfritta, he still wouldn't take no for an answer and hence he armed himself with the Netizens' Bane, Killer of Rational Arguments, Dealer of Rage, Armour of the Shouting Pup, the weapon called CAPS LOCK. Tired, Yfritta started ignoring the matter all together. Until all her friends started coming up to her complaining about a scary guy asking them for Yfritta's hand in marriage. Worse off, Anonto started spamming Yfritta's work page with outrageous wall posts.
At first, there were some faint smiles and mild jokes followed by some angry outbursts too but soon enough, Yfritta had to give in. She could not deal with the embarrassment. The guy asked all kinds of unpleasant things to her friends and colleagues, even though they all laughed at him and requested him to turn off caps lock. As if he would listen.
One day, Yfritta found out that Anonto has been decorating a house named Flickr with all her family photos which made her feel horribly unsafe and insecure. Who wouldn't find their lockers and wardrobes getting ploughed by strangers creepy?
Finally, she decided to cry and cry by the side of Daddy dearest so that he could send knights-in-shining-armour to hunt this creeper down but Daddy had already taken his leave from this tale.
The trees lost their leaves and regrew them. Snakes were out of hibernation and squirrels were again storing for the next winter. A year had passed. Then something happened and Anonto found his new love of life and left Yfritta alone. For this is the way of the creepers: they cannot creep on someone forever, they change targets.
The next girl had a very short fuse. And a scary older brother. They called the law enforcement agency on the creeper and had him locked up. And let me tell you, jail is not a good place to be.
And so kids, the moral of the story is that never trust anything that can think for itself when you can't see where it keeps its brain.
And don't be a creeper.
