Steal the glory

You’re having a lazy Saturday morning as you lay in bed thinking about how much more sleep you need to reclaim out of a hectic week that has left you battered to the core. As is the norm,you reach for your phone across the bed only to be hit by a string of notifications. You skim through and get that annoying forward from when Kenya became a British protectorate. You start to mull over it. You realize it is a trend burning like bush fire. If you do not nip it in the bud, you will become a victim of all the forwards doing rounds. Again, you do not want to appear as a mean, repelling and unappreciative being.

That tired message that has been passed from host to host, peer to peer, through all Kenya domains, passing from one East Africa core router to another, to yonder lands and back via undersea fibre, hitting China and bouncing off North America’s West Coast, year after year. A joke perhaps squeezed off all the juice. Chemists would call it amorphous. No form. No water. A tired ass meme that you saw on twitter the first few days you joined. That Facebook story that Mark Zuckerberg must have read when the app had less than a 100 users back in 2004. That Instagram picture from last elections. How do you deal with it? Do you ignore? Do you reply? And if you choose to reply, do you sugarcoat it for friendship’s sake? Stick around for ‘Introduction to Neanderthal Media Content 101’. If you feign excitement when you’re staring at a meme you have seen 10 times in 2 weeks, be assured that you might be reserving space in the hottest spot in hell. Why can’t you just be honest? You’re worried that you will break the sender’s heart? Please break it. Stop the vicious cycle to save a soul.

Depending with the season, you might choose to react different though. During Christmas or Easter, you might get a forward from 2012 that was redone in 2013 and is still alive and kicking. And you can be sure it will outlive the ambitious LAPSSET project. In the spirit of baby Jesus or the risen Messiah respectively, you just have to be nice and argue in the lines of, “After all, it’s the thought that counts!” Some circumstances necessitate recycling. That is an exception.  

What if it is ordinary time? In the middle of June. Someone hits you up with a looong text which you are familiar with. You curse under your breath. Here we go again! Then you reply so smoothly as if it was the first time you’re seeing the message. My friend, that ain’t right. I wish phones could capture our facial expressions when we receive messages. Those WhatApp blue ticks should be accompanied by that smirk!

You ever receive that old meme from a friend, or a close relative or someone you really respect and end up replying with a smiley :-) but deep down you can’t wait to free up your phone’s internal memory. Please, next time count the bytes, do the math, raise a claim form to be refunded.

In these good times of information technology, it happens quite a lot. Too much data available resulting to analysis paralysis or too many beaten up jokes. The most annoying are the religious one’s that come with punishment at the end if you fail to resend. Story for another day.

I will not name names. I will not give fictions characters either. If you find a behavior that resonates to you, you’re most welcome to ring me and probably we can diarize our meeting to discuss further. Do not sue me for defamation as I don’t intend to injure your reputation in the estimation of right thinking members of society. I hear defamation is pretty expensive and the way my bank account is set up, I might not afford to pay the damages.

The world has space for everyone nevertheless. There are people who enjoy those messages I love to hate. Depending on someone’s personality, something can remain relevant and funny over and over again. We’re wired very differently. I know of someone who can watch a movie over and over and over again. Each time getting cracked up afresh. How now??? You ask. I think such people are lucky to have their critical boring ratios (I don’t know what that is, don’t ask) default setting set up waaay to near infinity.    

I for instance can’t repeat a movie. Anything predictable is a no go zone. Unless it is a high school set book and the English teacher is breathing down my neck! Funny thing is that even after reading I-don’t-know-how-many-times, the probability of missing that dondoo is still high. If you get bored easily, you can either negotiate to have your critical boring ratio increased, which is impossible, or be a ‘bad’ person to save yourself of any avoidable Neanderthal media content.  

And, if you’re human enough you don’t want to burst another human’s bubble. You don’t want to steal their thunder. You don’t want to steal their glory. You let them shine. But sometimes we got to be honest. We got to burst their bubble. We got to steal their thunder. We got to steal their glory. Enough said!