This, in a nutshell, is the deal:
Please do not email me asking what’s up with your lost comment. I either deleted it because it was crummy, or it got stuck in moderation and I will liberate it soon, or it vanished into thin air due to some whim of the Internet. None of these scenarios requires your intervention with an email.
Therefore, if your question is “should I email you to ask what’s up with my lost comment?” the answer is “no.”
If you would like a lengthier, more obnoxious, and dorky explanation, read on.
Does the following describe you?
You’ve just finished reading one of my posts (for which eminent deed, if you’ll excuse the interruption, you deserve the gratitude of a nation) when an unfamiliar sensation washes over you. A few moments pass, but the sensation lingers. What tha — why, it’s the warm glow of brainiac transcendence! But what gives? you ask yourself, brushing a tear of happiness from your eye. Whatever could be the source of this unusual but most welcome psychical ease?
Suddenly you are awash in understanding. You and I, you realize, are two hearts that bleed as one. In fact, you are so utterly and completely in accordance with my totally awesome thesis that you’ve begun to physically effervesce with thoughts of profound, emphatic, and enlightened praise.
Or, somewhat more implausibly, you have spotted a flaw in my reasoning, and, like Folly, are anxious to freely upon my Wisdoms crack your jokes.
Now your urgent quest is to share your grandiloquent oratory with the world. To that noble end you compose an elegant morsel of argumentation in the comment box. You spell correctly, you eschew cliché, you even close your HTML tags. Then, with a brisk tap of the middle finger, you click the “Blame” button. But oh no! The spamulator has nuked your oeuvre!
You try the whole thing over again, but once more the result is bupkis (although this is for the best, since your first comment was way better).
Or perhaps you are a first-time blamer, or have included two or more links, both of which contingencies will cause WordPress to reject your comment flat out.
What to do about this animadversio interrupta? What to do?
As the sands pour through the hourglass, you begin to wonder what it all means. You stand before the mirror, asking yourself “Why me? Why?” Over and over in your increasingly tortured mind the possibilities churn: what you could have done to wound my gossamer sensibilities? Did you inadvertently use an ellipsis? No. Did you begin a sentence with the pre-verbal utterance “Um”? Nugatory. Did you liken me to the Nazis or pepper your metaphrasery with such sentiments as “U fugly harey bitch, what U need isa good fcuk”? No, of course you didn’t. The only possible explanation for this brutal comment murder is that I have a grudge against you and wish to censor your brilliance.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Well, that’s crap. Before you send me an email in which you have a cow, I implore you to take a few moments to contemplate the facts:
In the first place, your comment wasn’t that great. In the second place, I do not have it in for you personally. I don’t even know you. It’s the spamulators. They think your comment is spam. They can’t help it. They’re just lines of indifferent and flawed code written by indifferent and flawed geeks looking at internet porn.
Because the spine-tingling life of a spinster aunt frequently takes her beyond the perimeter of her bungalow, I regret that I am unable to sit at the computer 24 hours a day monitoring the comment flow. Although I do my best, I do not kid myself that my efforts are adequate. Still, ever since my secretary Phil quit (in retrospect, maybe I should have given him that day off to take his sick baby to the hospital after all) this is as good as it’s gonna get. So, assuming your comment isn’t a piece of doo-doo, it may be a day or two before it sees the light of day.
Some tips to get you through these tough times
1. Be advised that comments meeting any the following conditions are immediately diverted to the Moderation Queue, where, as I mention above, I may not see them for a couple of days. Have patience.
– All first-time commenters
– Comments containing two or more hyperlinks
– Comments containing the acronym “BDSM”
– Really long comments
– Comments containing the phrase “teh [anything]”
– Comments containing innocuous words that just happen to be all or part of the screen names of posters who have been banned.
– Comments selected entirely at random by the blog code
2. If you expect your comment will be an invaluable contribution to human endeavor (and if you don’t, why are you foisting it off on me?), use a text editor, rather than the comment box, in which to compose it. Even if you don’t get spamulated, the World Wide Web may still devour it whole if you fail to take this step.
3. Do not use Internet Explorer.
4. Recall that we have never met, and resist the urge to imagine that I have taken a dislike to you. That you’re reading I Blame The Patriarchy at all is enough to recommend you as a true sport.
5. Suck it up. Let it go. Yes, your comment was witty and insightful (at least to you), and I sympathize, but let’s face it: this blog is pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme.
6. At the risk of coming off like one of those tiresome busier-than-thou ‘popular’ bloggers who selflessly and ceaselessly goes to extreme unpaid lengths for her readers so why don’t you cut me some slack already, I’m begging you to cut me some slack already.
Please do not email me asking what’s up with your lost comment, because I promise you, I don’t have the slightest idea.
Latest Blamer Invective