September 2002

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Besides grief, the other topic of the week in Beckyland is greed. That's right, the linkers are at it again. This time, instead of wanting to cram every word in the English language into the highlighted portion of the links text, they'e decided ("they" being the ones in the group who aggravate the hell out of me) to go on a witch hunt, err, reciprocal link hunt, to see who's naughty and who's nice.

Since I'm pretty sure my list is updated correctly, including those dreadful, grammatically difficult if not incorrect links, I certainly don't mind if all seventy-some of them go looking, and if they all go back to the group with reports. What I do mind is the fifty-some notes in my e-mail inbox, most of which were written in the tattletale tone that makes one want to slap the tattler into the next state, complaining that someone hasn't updated the links an hour or so after the corrected list for the month has been shared with the group.

There is one woman in the group who must have majored in sanctimonious in college. I'm pretty sure she made good grades in her chosen subject; I'm absolutely sure she is a master at it. There's just one itty-bitty problem: I have no tolerance for that kind of crap.

She gets out her sanctimony degree and uses it at least twice a day, whining about how someone has left her off a list, and after all, she joined the group two months ago and it's just NOT RIGHT that she hasn't been added already, since she always does her updates. And on and on, until I want to print those messages and send them to her, with careful instructions as to where she should store them, along with an unwritten but fervent hope that she gets many, many paper cuts in the storage place.

I'm thinking I need to break my silence and explain to them in simple terms that there is serendipity about finding things on the web. They need to know, for example, that if someone isn't looking for peanut butter fizzlepops, it doesn't matter that my entry mentioning them ranks number one at you-know-what search engine, so if their overly-wordy links text didn't get updated to add more words, it doesn't matter so much. If someone really wants to know something about the aforementioned fizzlepops, they won't find that phrase highlighted in any link, but they will find it because the search bots did, in all its plain-text glory, here.

By the way, I had forgotten exactly when I wrote the entry with fizzlepops in it. Rather than searching my archives, I took the simpler route: I searched the term.