Last night, my twitter timeline exploded into a comedy of errors brought on by the typo of one single troll. (See, trolls, you can make a difference!) The takeaway is that trolls make typos too and because trolls are people too and feel embarrassed when they make mistakes (just like non-trolls), they too will delete a tweet once they realize that they typed, for example, the word link instead of the word lick. See image below.

 

 

 

 

GOPBullhorn, as he calls himself, was particularly offended by this tweet of mine:

 

 

 

 

So he replied:

 

 

 

 

Now for those of you who have followed me on twitter a long time, you know that I believe that trolls are deliberately and strategically trying to/succeeding at stealing our time. In other words, when they get you to respond, they win AND they take (steal!!) minutes away from you, minutes that you could spend on your true mission which is to tweet to that demographic of people who *are* receptive to your message. BUT – and it’s a big butt – if another person or entity is mentioned in the tweet, as Walmart was in this case, then I will often reply in order to make the PR/twitter person at that organization/entity take note that WeThePeople are watching and taking action. So I replied:

 

 

 

 

 

And IMMEDIATELY a crowd of members of my “twitter family,” as I call them, leapt to my defense and took on this troll with more vim and vigor than this blogger knew existed on a Saturday night online!

 

And this troll was truly horrible – insulted my friend Jesus and called us morons, fuckers, etc., here …

 

 

 

 

and here:

 

 

 

 

*Yes, the article from Business Insider, which cited statistical information from 1913 to 2008, was indeed from 2011 which means it’s actually four years old. Luckily, the historical data I quoted in my tweet didn’t change between 2011 and 2015. So that’s good!!

 

But it gets better. At this point, I had stopped replying to the troll but was favoriting all the responses from my twitter family who were valiantly defending the truth, and that’s when GOPBullhorn tweeted the “link my scrotum” comment. So then I replied to that, saying, “LOL, click on the link” – which made him realize his mistake and delete the tweet. But I of course had taken a screen shot of it.

 

 

 

 

And this is where the hilarity ensued: Julie seemed genuinely confused when she tweeted this …

 

 

https://twitter.com/juliemains/status/589678869625450497

 

 

And Mad Dad tweeted this …

 

 

 

 

to which I replied…

 

 

 

 

and then because things had gotten so out of hand, I remarked that this is better than an ’80’s sitcom – that I hoped the NSA was enjoying the comedy of errors my TL had become that evening, and Julie (still in complete seriousness, I thought) replied …

 

 

https://twitter.com/juliemains/status/589681246441091072

 

 

I was literally rolling on the floor laughing! Well, on the couch. Which led to the realization that I should make the whole thing a blog post AND …

 

 

 

 

So from now on, whenever any of us gets trolled, lets use this hashtag as a way to alert each other. Think we can get #LinkMyScrotum trending?

 

Finally, the moral of the story …