Facepalm

I have come to the irrefutable conclusion that the holiday season is a bleak time. It is a time when some people realise that they are irredeemably and undeniably alone in this world. As part of a desperate cry of loneliness, they turn to Facebook and reach out to someone - anyone - in the hope that companionship lies within the cyber-abyss.

And then they have the misfortune of sending someone like me a Facebook message. If they are even unluckier, they will stumble across their own message in a post like - why - this one.

Take this chappie, for example, who must've been in some kind of pre-Yuletide funk. In search of someone to kiss under the mistletoe, he's decided that the best way to message a complete stranger is to pretend that he's done it before, the idiot. In doing so - even under false pretenses - he's demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge of the cardinal rule of dating: only a loser has to ask if someone has received his message/SMS/email. No response is response enough, you poor bastard.



And then there is this guy, who had the misfortune of my reading his message when I was in Lombok and getting into a scuffle with locals who did not understand the concept of queueing. Rather than ignore him, I decided to make the rejection explicit.



A few days later, however, he made clear that English was not something he'd list as a strength if he were to ever audition for The Apprentice.



Sometimes, I'm willing to grant that it's not seasonal blues that push you towards chucking your dignity at strangers online. Maybe you're driven by the allure of a clean slate that the new year brings, like this schmo. What was this fellow's new year's resolution, I wonder. To alienate every sane woman on the planet? I've sent out blanket press queries that were more personalised than this.



I'd feel sorry for the lot of them, but I've come to realise that there is no male equivalent for the word 'minger'. Men have no qualms calling women who don't make the grade all sorts of names, but have such a warped idea of their own equity that they reach way beyond their league.

I don't have the time or patience to coin a male equivalent of 'minger', but let me just state - and this is for every girl who's been overlooked in a bar - boys, beyond a shadow of a doubt: you're completely and categorically out of your league.

Toodles.