The following account is based on actual events.
In case you are somehow not privy to my secret life, I am quite popular in the online trivia world. (Okay, cyberfriends who are reading this - just go with it for a minute, alright? Thanks.). Yeah, in fact I have recently helped lead a successful revolution.
See, there was a room that used to be fun - let's say like pre-1957 Cuba - and people played the game and had little side conversations about jobs & kids, and there was goodnatured sarcasm & innocent flirting. Then something changed - Castro lost his vision, Che Guevara left - and the tone of the room was altered. Gradually it became evident that some people took this trivia world a tad too seriously. Complaints about misspellings and erroneous answers to questions were called insulting to the room owner; permission was required to type in caps; certain people were told to not distract from the trivia by talking about other things (how is it a chat room without chatting, I ask you?).
And finally - the embargo - we (I refer now to myself and fellow revolutionaries) were commanded to stop 'booing' jokingly at people who answered too quickly (there was an 8-second rule). Because the 'booing' hurt feelings. Yes, you read that right. There are so many levels to this crazy, it's hard to figure where to start. It's trivia. It's anonymous. WE ARE GROWN-UPS. (Oops, I used caps without asking). So my comrades & I defected to another room last night, and it was glorious. Liberating.
But today we are told of chatters in our former room being interrogated, asked who was involved and if they, too, are leaving; transcripts of our final hour have been read and discussed with fury. Suddenly it's the McCarthy hearings in cyberspace. Tonight we're discussing who else we want to 'take with us,' as though it is the fall of Saigon (sorry to mix metaphors - the drama is overtaking me).
The horror...the horror.
