IT Failures? Or Gremlins?

Since today is Halloween, I'm going to talk about the gremlins who actually cause those mysterious failures of IT tech that my fellow Whores have been discussing all week. No, not the Gremlins of movie fame and much adorableness (unless fed after midnight...), but the original gremlins the RAF pilots started blaming for airplane failures in the 1920's.

These annoying, wire-cutting imps were first mentioned in a poem in 1929, but had been complained of in aviation circles for quite a few years prior. When you're flying a biplane, you don't want the wires cut! One writer claimed the name derived from an Old English word gremian, defined as "to vex". Someone else gives the gremlin a less lofty origin, inferring that some inebriated pilots might have combined the word Grimm from Grimm's Fairytales with Fremlin Beer. (I kinda like that theory.) Another source proposed that these were Scottish elves or fairies who'd developed an interest in technology along with the rest of the modern world. (And now they've moved on to tinkering with laptops and computers mwahahahahaha!)

Roald Dahl, who'd been in the RAF, wrote a children's novel about gremlins in the early 1940's, which was published and attracted Walt Disney's attention. The story was optioned for a movie, which then became a proposal for a short feature, which then eventually got cancelled over rights issues. I guess the gremlins were at work there too!

Others wrote about gremlins, and there were radio programs, and even a Bugs Bunny cartoon. And of course William Shatner's encounter with a gremlin in the "Twilight Zone" episode entitled "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" remains a classic.

Interestingly to me, the theories about the "why" of gremlin stories in wartime focused on aviation being so new, with many failures of equipment. Mechanical problems were so common, with no obvious explanation, that psychologists proposed the airmen made up these stories as a coping mechanism. Add in the fact that many of these failures occurred during combat, which is stressful in and of itself. Considering the crews often flew at great altitude with early oxygen mask technology, there may have been an element of hallucination at work as well. Combat historian Marlan Bressi even credited the legend of the gremlin with helping win the Battle of Britain by keeping morale up because pilots didn't have to blame each other or their ground crews for the problems - no fingerpointing. Blame the gremlins!

I leave you with Mr. Shatner and his gremlin:

Trolling the Trolls

So there's a brilliant flowchart. Drawn by someone who actually knows how to draw flowcharts. I can just leave it here to address the topic of trolls. Sure. He's addressing reading your Amazon reviews, but it's all the same, isn't it? You don't here the good ones. You only obsess over the mean, crappy ones. Thus, the decision tree for how to handle Amazon reviews (sub in trolls).

What? I shouldn't just leave that here and walk away? Dang. Okay. How about the Psychology Today article pointing out what the internet, even in infancy, knew about trolls all along? That they're narcissists, psychopaths, and sadists. Not that I'll claim the internet knew any such thing with the experimental and researched certainly that Psychology Today likely knows it - but who among us had been on the internet for more than an hour before being given the Second Rule of the Internet: Don't Feed the Trolls (the First Rule is: All Caps = Shouting = You're Making Yourself Look Bad). The interwebs, in its amassed unconscious wisdom, knew from the get go that the only way to deal with trolls was to starve them out. That by denying them sustenance, we'd be essentially trolling the trolls.

Trolls are all about themselves. No one else. It's all about them. Always has been. Always will be. Little dried up emotional vampires, they feed upon any and all reaction they can elicit from others. The danger to you is that this is how they multiply. Responding to trolls is the internet equivalent of getting a gremlin wet (and/or feeding them after midnight. Pick your poison.)

Trolls. Save your time and your energy for you. Don't feed the monsters.