EggsOverEggs

Yahoo Answers

Many of you are aware that there is a site on the internets called Yahoo.com.  It’s a relatively entertaining site with a few decent features.  For instance; I have a yahoo email account which I check thirty to forty times an hour while im at work.  Most of the time there are no new messages in my inbox, but it’s not really about receiving new messages anymore.  I use it more as a jump point.  What do I mean by this?  Well say I’m sitting at my desk working.  Like actually working.  Every ten minutes or so an alarm will go off in my head, and I’ll think “hey I haven’t checked my email in a while.  Maybe there’s something new and exciting on there.”  Most of the time my inbox remains unchanged, but that’s ok.  I believe that my subconscious goal in habitually checking my yahoo mail is to divert my attention away from my work and focus it toward the interwebs.  If this is truely what my brain is trying to do, it is doing a fantastic job.  By the time I hit the refresh button on my browser to see if any new messages pop up I’ve already forgotten about my work.  Then it’s play time. 

The newest internet tool of distraction I’ve discovered is Yahoo Answers.  This an online forum hosted by Yahoo.com on which people can ask and answer open questions on any subject they so desire.  All you need to participate on Yahoo Answers is a Yahoo.com profile with one of those gay little avatars and you’re good to go.  So you may be thinking “what’s so great about this?  How is it that you can claim to be so enamoured with this site?”  Well let me explain about the dude.  I enjoy giving people a hard time.  I enjoy being sarcastic…extremely sarcastic like all the time.  I have a very very super dry sense of humor, and my perception of the general public is that they could probably afford to turn the tv off for a while and read a few books. (if you catch my drift.)  With these character traits combined, Yahoo Answers becomes the absolute best place on the internet to fuck with people. 

I have been a Yahoo Answers member since July 9 of this year.  I heard about the service through a little site called failblog.org which posted a question which was previously asked on Yahoo Answer.  This question was as follows: 

“Why are there school?  Is it a point to it?” 

Does that make sense to you?  I mean I understand what the person was trying to ask, but the grammar is so bad I have difficulty believing that this was a legitimate question and not just a joke.  But imagine for a minute that it was truely a legit question posed by some moronic high school student whose failed English seven years strait and is just itching to turn 16 so he can drop out.  How funny is that?  I sat there and thought about the question for a few minutes, and I was able to picture the kid sitting there at his mom’s computer convinced that someone on Yahoo Answers who spoke bad grammar would be able to explain just what the point is to school is.  I laughed.  I had to laugh because there was nothing else to do.  To think of that question being legitimate, and to think there are people out there who are that dumb, makes me feel a lot better about myself.  Now, I’m no genius, and I certainly have never held myself out to be.  Add to that the fact that my brain reduces in sizes by 50% every weekend due to alcohol consumption, one could make the arguement that I’m only getting dumber.  So this kid who asked this question makes me feel good for two reasons. 1) I know that I’m a lot smarter than some folks out there, and 2) when my brain finally does turn to a soft gooey consistency perfect for watching Springer and breeding with an obese woman in a hammock I know I’ll have plenty of company.  Ignorance is bliss as they say.

Then I thought to myself maybe this kid isn’t as dumb as he sounds.  Maybe he’s writing questions like these just to get a reaction out of people.  There’s nothing quite as interesting as seeing how someone responds to a certain stimulus.  An outrageous question like that, however poorly worded it may have been did indeed provoke quite a response from the Yahoo Answers community with over 100 users posting a response to the question.  As expected most of the users took his question seriously and pleaded with this this poor lost soul to stay in school and apply himself.  The majority of the participants who didn’t anwer sincerely simply called the kid an idiot an moved.  Rightly so.  Then there were a select few who left responses such as “dude this jut made my day.” or “hahaha i’m laughing so hard right now there’s milk coming out my nose and I’m not even drinking milk.”  These people get it.  It was a joke, they understood it was a joke, and they are letting this kid know that they liked the joke and thought it was funny.  After some thought I realized that this was probably the case.  I mean whose grammar is really that bad?  Beyond that, if the kid was so stupid, then how the hell “school” correctly.  That’s not an easy word.  It doesn’t even have a “k’ in it.  Although you’d think it would cause it sounds like it does.  It took me decades to figure that out. 

So I took this idea and ran with it.  The first thing I did was take this kid’s question and repost it under my profile, just to see what kind of response it would get second time around.  As expected the results were pretty much the same.  A lot of people called me stupid, some people laughed, and some people thought I was serious. 

For my first orginal question I decided to get a bit more elaborate and see how far I could stretch the tolerance of the Yahoo Answers community.  I posed the query “how much blood loss is too much?”  The great thing about Yahoo Answers is that they give you an area to elaborate on your question to make it as specific and point focused as possible.  My elaboration on this question was as follows:

“Basically what I want to know is how much blood a person of average size can lose before he passes out or dies.  Like say I’m trying to break into my Ex’s apartment to go through her shit and maybe steal some stuff and I cut my arm on on a piece of broken glass while I’m climbing through her window.  How much time do I have and how much blood can I lose before I pass out.  The only reason I ask is cause it would be super embarassing if she found me in her apartment like that again.”

The responses I got from this question were few and frankly I was surprised at the lack of reaction I got from this.  I think there were only three responses and all of them were very well thought out and seemed to generally ignore the part about me losing blood because I’m breaking into my ex’s apartment.  The responses told me how much blood I could lose in a short period of time (I think they said like three pints, but I don’t remember) before passing out.  The question was actually removed a few days later for some “terms of use violation” which was never explained to me.  I was disappointed to say the least.  I had put a lot of thought into that question, and it turned out to be all for not.  Apparently people are more interested in the rantings of a poorly educated high school student than the maniacle acts of a suspicious ex boyfriend who may or may not be a hemophiliac. 

From then on I sort of dumbed down the questions.  I won’t go into detail on all the questions I asked, but I will tell you I came up with some pretty good ones that got some great responses.  The fun of it kind of died down after a while, but it was entertaining while it lasted.  I made some people LOL.  I pissed some people off, and hopefully I touched the lives of more than just a few of them.  These days I find myself answering more questions than asking.  I seem to get a certain satisfaction in answering questions in totally fucked up ways.  Sometimes it even works out.  I have an 11% best answer rate.  That means out of my 200 questions answered, 22 of them have been chosen as the best answer for that question.  So apparently there are some people out there who get me.

On a side note, there is no ex girlfriend whose apartment I want to break into.  I have ex girlfriends, but I’d like to think we’re all either on pretty good terms or simply have no interest in each other whatsoever.  Sometimes I feel I need to make these things painstakingly obvious for the more “literal” reader.  Also I do not suffer from Hemophilia.  On a sub side note, Hemophilia used to be referred to as the “Royal Disease” because a large number of the Nobility carried it in Europe due an inordinate amount of inbreeding intended to maintain the royal bloodlines.  I am also not inbred or of Nobility.  I just am.