Awkward moments abound when you pass someone in the hallway for the seventh or eighth time in one day. As they start to look at you strangely, you think of telling them it's just a coincidence, but then it would seem weird if you mentioned that you noticed it too. People avoid being slated as stalkers every day. On Facebook, if someone posts a question on their friend's wall that you know the answer to, of course you want to answer it but refrain because you barely know the people and the question was posted less than a minute ago. This is intentionally avoiding being a stalker. However, sometimes it looks like people are being stalkers even when they're not. Here's something that happened to me a few minutes ago:
For my English class, we often post our homework responses in an online forum, a wiki where you can see what your classmates have posted. Homework over this weekend was to read two poems and respond to one of two forums in the wiki. Having read both of them, I chose my favorite of the two and typed up a stellar response. Clicking onto the wiki, I noticed so far, only two people had responded to the poem I had chosen. Excellent! I copied my response from my open word document and prepared to post it into the "reply" box. But what is this? A new response?
-less than a minute ago- Response from ********..
Aw man, this guy just wrote almost exactly what I did! And he posted mere seconds before I was going to!!
Now I'm at a crossroads. Should I just not post my response at all, and respond to the other wiki? Or change my response so it's not so similar? But it was such a wonderful response!! It took me about half an hour to write this one stellar paragraph! It's full of quotes and references, the spelling and grammar are all correct, and it seems to be the longest of the responses so far. But I can't post it!! It's very similar to the one that was just posted, and if I posted mine only a few minutes after his, it would seem I copied from him ..
So, in the end, I changed a few aspects of my paragraph and posted it. It's not as stellar as it was before, and it's still quite similar to the one posted above it. I can't help but think how things would be different if I had just posted my paragraph a minute before I was going to ...
Oh, crap. I just checked our previous night's homework and discovered I posted directly after him on that night, too ...
I promise I'm not a stalker.
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