Putting The Cart Before The Horse (And Disrespecting Them, Too)

Many years back on social media, an acquaintance was referred to by another name by those in close contact with them, but only they were allowed to call them that. Let’s say their name was Alexander, and friends called them Lex.

Another person — I’ll call them Charlie — popped up out of the blue and immediately took to calling my acquaintance Lex. No matter how many times Alexander said that they didn’t like being called that by a stranger, Charlie persisted until blocked — and until that point, they used it increasingly frequently, up to multiple times per sentence.

It was pretty clear that Charlie thought that by using the friends-only name, Alexander would take Charlie in as a friend. When it didn’t work, the strategy was to try harder.

To this day, I have never been sure whether Charlie actually cared or not about the acquaintance. I just knew that Charlie’s parents didn’t raise them very well, in a “leave me alone” style, and basically just gave Charlie a social media account so they wouldn’t bother their parents so much.