Making an assumption about somebody is a little like leaping from a plane with a defective parachute in that you are jumping to a conclusion. Plastering your ill-formed conclusion all over social media is downright fucking stupid. I am in a state of extreme piss-off after reading about that woman in Melbourne who assumed the man taking a selfie beside the Darth Vader cut-out was a creeping pervert. Seriously, woman, my husband and I have photographs of ourselves beside a life-size cut-out of Suzi Quatro. Does this make us creeping perverts? No. Does it make us a bit tragic? Possibly. But perverts: definitely not.
But this gronk of a woman decided to stalk the man, take a picture, and then posted it onto Facebook with a warning about the 'creep' taking photos of her kids, etc, etc, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, and throw in a few blah-blah-blahdy-blahs on top of it. She's since had the error of her totally reckless and impulsive ways brought to her attention, and she is remorseful. And if you're reading this, woman: so you should be. Look, I'm aware I'm not behaving in a particularly Gandhi-like fashion myself in having a go at this woman here, but God, I wish people would stop making rubbish assumptions and then taking to social media with it. This guy's life could have been ruined. All because someone saw a guy taking a photo near kids ('Oooh, look, a pervert!'). People like this probably see a swarthy man drinking orange juice at the pub and think he's about to detonate a bomb, or they're buying their fish and chips at the café and think the young bloke in the hoodie is about to rob the place.
So, yes, they see someone at a shopping centre do something as outrageous as stand near a cardboard effigy and DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!!! goes the internal Pervert-Alarm these dunderheads have in their DNA, and next thing you know, they're taking pictures, and posting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and causing trouble all over the place, thinking themselves some kind of heroic crusader.
Something that really gave me a galloping case of the irrits over this was that it reminded me of an immensely aggravating woman with whom I once worked. This was a law office in Sydney when I was aged twenty-one, and I daresay she was about twenty-two. It was a moderately-sized firm, and there was a work function on, and a group of us were walking to the venue. She became convinced the guy walking behind us was 'following us', or more specifically, her, and demanded one of the male junior clerks confront him. I should point out this clerk was so weedy he made Mick Jagger look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I cannot for the life of me imagine what she thought he would be able to do to her imagined stalker. Possibly confuse and annoy him for a few seconds until the alleged stalker swatted him aside like a pesky fly. I pointed out to the woman that this particular person was one of many who happened to be walking in the same direction along Pitt Street, Sydney at 5.30pm, an occurrence that could hardly be cause for concern, after all, he was most likely on his way home from work like most of the people walking along Pitt Street at that time. Or possibly he was going to a dinner venue himself. What he was unlikely to be doing was following us in particular. To crown it all, a car went past and honked the horn. So when we reached the restaurant where the dinner was to be held, she sat in the bar where we were having our aperitifs and said, 'I am not surprised that car honked, because I know I'm attractive to men.' She regaled us with this revelation in the manner of a teacher explaining why bicarbonate soda makes the cake rise, or tenderises the meat. The rest of us eye-rolled and sipped our drinks. One junior clerk wondered to herself did it not occur to this vacuous bimbette the driver could have been honking at someone else. That junior clerk was me, and yeah, the honkee about whom I wondered was me. Valuing my credibility, I knew better than to say that aloud. Typing it here in this blog, some twenty-five plus years later, has probably shattered my credibility as effectively as a precision-thrown frag.
But the moral to the story, as it always is, is when you assume you make an ASS of U and ME.
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