The internet isn’t confined to our phone screens and computers. It’s branched out into almost every aspect of our daily lives.
This can be good, but the two worlds aren’t as disconnected as you may sometimes like. Weird internet behaviour can be spotted in real life. It prompted franki-pinks to ask which things people thought were online myths until they happened to them. They even got the ball rolling with their own suggestion:
‘Snitching on employees to their employers. I’ve owned my own business for just over ten years and I’ve got around 100 employees and it’s never happened to me until today. Like buses, I’ve waited forever and then just got to work and checked my emails and there’s two of them!
One is about an employee who posted an awareness message for a horrible illness children get. Someone replied “what about the kids in xxxx?” And my employee replied “that’s not relevant”. The email said they look forward to my response, that’ll be a two word response to that email.
The other is even more pathetic. One of the employees was seen carrying two bottles of wine from an off licence into a works van. Someone sent me an email with a picture of them carrying the two bottles to the van and then another of them driving off. They simply said “so you employ drunk drivers?” I think that may be another two word response.’
Reddit stepped up, so here are 17 examples of behaviour that shouldn’t be real.
1.
‘Some busybody tried to complain about me to my boss. They didn’t realise however that I’m self-employed, and I’m the only employee. So they emailed my company email address to complain about me, to me.’
-parttimepedant
2.
‘Literally getting scammed.
Got a text from my bank 4 weeks post-partum saying my card was blocked and I had to enter information to unblock it including my CVV number on the back of the card. I actually filled out the form.
LUCKILY I blocked the card about 5 mins later after my brain cells kicked in. Baby brain is really something else.’
-Sure-Sail-528
3.
‘Covid deniers. Until I got a new job mid-lockdown, we were asked to wear masks when moving about the office and 2 people went on deranged rants about how ridiculous that was.
One even started spouting a crazy theory that PPE was laced with addictive chemicals.’
-hunsnet457
4.
‘Openly misgendering trans women. There was a trans woman in our team, and an old bloke kept using “him” to refer to her. He obviously thought he was making a stand of some sort, but he just looked like a crazy person.’
-JeffSergeant
5.
‘Flat Earthers. I always assumed it was a big unspoken joke but then I met one in the flesh.’
-exile_10
6.
‘We had an employee “invited to resign” over his behaviour on Facebook.
Started off as fairly standard banter regarding football but quickly descended in to the employee throwing racist abuse. He had who his employers were clearly visible on his profile and everything was set to public.’
-Competitive-Fact-820
7.
‘I found out recently that one of my mates actually believes in God. Not just going to church to get their kids into the local school or whatever, and I thought it was just old people.
-Srapture
8.
‘Used to deal with FOI requests for a huge organisation.
The number of conspiracy theorists was a lot. Some were clearly totally batshit, others like chemtrails guy were intelligent and charming until I tried explaining why we don’t have any data on the plastic strings that planes leave in the sky.’
-DameKumquat
9.
‘I’ve not experienced too much culture war nonsense in real life. A couple of weeks ago, I got made fun of and called ‘woke’ for supporting the Red Roses in the Rugby world cup. It was by someone that not 10 minutes before was praising the weirdos painting flags on roundabouts and literally had a St. George’s cross tattoo.’
-uncle_monty
