Several friends informed me that the comments section was a bit of a horror show. I assumed that they meant I was being attacked there — perhaps for offering comfort to the enemy, or for being naive, or for writing about the subject from the privileged position of someone who had never really suffered at the hands of folks with harmful ideas and offering those nasty people a sort of unearned and cheap grace. Or perhaps for the general sin of being a fucking idiot. All of those would probably qualify as valid criticisms.

As it turns out, I am mentioned in the comments, or at least in a few of them. For the most part, though, it’s 100+ posts of people calling each other assholes. Yes, I get it, comments sections are about the lowest form of human discourse, ranking somewhere south of the things people shout at hockey referees. But one can’t but feel a sort of wry amusement (here defined as “a reflexive sentiment experienced as a sort of emotional prophylactic to avoid feelings of overwhelming sadness”) upon seeing people respond to a call for tolerance by assaulting each other online.

I will then make a hammer, also vanishingly small, its wooden handle as thin as a thought.

And then tonight, after a year of wandering in the wilderness, occasionally logging on to my account to poke futilely at various settings and whatnot, I tried an entirely new tact known as Calling Customer Support, and a Man With An Accent fixed everything in somewhat more than four and somewhat less than seven minutes.

At one point during our short conversation he asked if the photo on the “about” page was, in fact, me. When I replied in the affirmative he offered that I sounded very different than I looked. Ah, I said, and then for some reason completely failed to follow up on that obvious opening and inquire what he thought I should look like, if not Receding Hairline Jew.

I think I was partially distracted from asking because at that very moment I had been trying to picture his appearance — I was having a hard time placing his accent, which  sounded like the product, or perhaps victim, of extensive accent reduction sessions. It struck me that the overall distance and deviation of his pronunciation from dull midwestern English hadn’t been so much reduced as shifted around, somewhat like squeezing a balloon, as if concentrating on shaping his diphthongs this way made him then mispronounce his long vowels that way. His voice also had a syrupy quality to it that  reminded me of Marvin the Martian, which can only make one feel happy, and other than puzzling me with his unplaceable accent, which of course wasn’t his fault**, he was extremely friendly and helpful and as I said fixed everything in no time, and if he felt any contempt for my technical incompetence he hid it perfectly. So thank you, Man With Accent in anonymous call center located somewhere else, you have helped me relaunch my blog. Perhaps we will speak again soon, when I f@#& something new up and need help.

* Sadder in the sense that I would tell people, hey, check out my blog, and they’d then do so, only to report back to me that my blog consisted of a page saying “no input file specified.” This at least made me sad.

** And we can pretty much guarantee that I don’t speak his native language at all, so who am I to comment?

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