Looks like our very own message board fool has even more free time than usual today. Probably ran out of hand lotion. Anyway, I decided to read some of his posts to see if I could penetrate the shield – find out a little something about the REAL UpBob/Dale/David/Peter/etc.

My first thought about our friend is that he is probably not employed – judging from the times of his posts today. Though maybe he lives in Australia - or maybe he works the graveyard shift, but in any case he is plainly ill equipped to find any job that involves working on a computer, so the only place he would have access to one would be at home… or, in this case, his parents’ home. I will go out on a limb and guess that his hours become somewhat truncated when the school year starts back up. Let’s put his age somewhere in the teens, then.

If I remember correctly, his postings started out directed toward silver strikers (specifically silver strike values) and now involve slabbing. He seems to have a peripheral awareness that these issues exist, yet shows no depth of understanding as to their meanings. I’ll put him at about 16-18 years old. Which puts him, unfortunately, in high school.

I say unfortunately, because I find it astounding that a high school student could write at the level at which he does. My seven-year-old son would never make the kind of grammatical and spelling errors that our friend posts, yet he is clearly in his teens. Here is some of his composition from today, with some red highlights:

THE ONLY FOOL IS YOU MARV!!! YOU THINK YOUR A MR NO IT ALL , TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS THE TRUTH ABOUT ALL YOUR SLABB CHIPS YOU HAVE? YOU THINK I FORGOT THE ONES YOU TRYED TO SELL ME LAST YEAR

Three sentences, a question mark after a statement, and nothing after a question. Third grade grammar.

Then this gem – short and sweet:

MARV HAS SLABB CHIPS
ASK HIM!!

Then this:

MARV YOU PLAY ON BOTH SIDS OF THE GAME? YOU ARE THE KING OF CHIPS AND SILVER STRIKES? YOU MAY FOOL YOUR FRIENDS ON THE MESSAGE BOARD BUT I NO YOU MUCH BETTER, BEWARE ARCHIE, YOU ARE ALL BEING MADE A FOOL OF!! WHO DO YOU THINK WAS BEHIND THE VOTE?

The first time he used “NO” instead of “KNOW”, it might have been that he was just in too much of a hurry to think. At all. This clarifies that he actually thinks this is correct. This is a first grade word – my son learned it last year. “SIDS” could be a typo, but the last sentence goes from plural “YOU ARE ALL…” to singular “…A FOOL…” within two words.

A few more jewels from this afternoon:

slabb chips the way to go

you can not stop us!! just kept spending all your hard earn money!! ha ha ha ha ha marv is the mole

your all missing the boat here!!! spend that $$$$$$$ honey

And here’s one that’s particularly well thought out:

sorry my friend we live in usa freedom of speech!!! you ever hear of that, who ever this person is or anyone one else has the right to speak his or her mind, i guess you must be anti american? or just a sour chip collector?? you make us all sick! my vote is for mors slabing

Some very creative sentence structure. Barely decipherable.

I find this one interesting – he’s posing as adult (employed, no less):

i have a life my friend, and please watch your words you use on this message board, my life is selling slabb chips to all you chip collectors?? its a good liveing, you would be very supprised to know there are a lot of closet slabb chip collectors out there, you make us very rich
all my thanks for my cars,homes,swining pools,and lots of slabb chips
thank you

Hard to know where to begin here – not a single correct instance of punctuation in the entire paragraph. And how old were YOU when you learned words like “living”, “surprised”, and “swimming”?

But, my all-time, absolute favorite post of Bob/Dale/David/etc. is this one:

archie,archie we want slabbing!! your a very uneducated soul

WOW!!!

I think that we should have some pity on this guy - give him a little slack. Have you even considered the kind of future that lies in store for this chap? Have some empathy, some compassion. Let's try to put ourselves in his shoes – a high school student with a first-grade intellect. College is clearly not an option (imagine the entrance essay). I think what we have here is a career minimum-wage worker who can maybe dream of joining the ranks of the good folks here on the ChipBoard. I think he stumbled across some people enjoying a pursuit that is, and will be, totally out of reach for him, and decided to cause a little disruption.

So let’s read his posts. Let’s respond to them, have him delete his originals, and leave our responses hanging out there. Let’s let him have his little fun until he gets kicked off by his ISP.