A true story about a human situation in a virtual world.
Female: Lady. Male: Lord.
Lord and Lady met by chance over trade and later, found out they shared mutual friends and eventually, it sealed a stronger bond. This led to Lord asking Lady to train with him on a regular basis. Lady agreed. Both were convinced of each other's compatibility although they also knew that both were very independent and strong-willed personalities. Training practices together were on a nightly basis - every night without fail and soon, their game characters grew extremely strong. The exchange of information was also constant and enhanced their online relationship. But they were always mere good friends and nothing beyond that.
One day, Lord logged in and was upset over a personal matter. Thus, he delayed his usual polite and enthusiastic greetings of the entire buddy list. Lady knew something was wrong. However, a friend had asked her for a quick favour and she changed channel to head on to the free market for an urgent purchase. Admist this, she saw that every buddy was greeted except her. Horrors. Surprises. Why??? She was practically his best friend. Was there something wrong, she thought.
So, Lady decided to ask him. Instead of an explanation, she was yelled at and eventually insulted. She became very puzzled because Lord claimed he said hi to her but she had been following the chat closely and could not have missed out any detail. Nonetheless, she still double-checked her chat log very cautiously and insisted there was no mention of her.
Lord flew into a rage and they proceeded to have a public ranting of sorts. She could not understand why he was so mad. Then, the typical egoistic side of him spoke - "Take a screenshot and exchange immediately over MSN." Fine, she thought - that should resolve everything.
However, Murphy's Law exists. For some weird reason, her MSN was unable to start. He used this to turn the tables on her and claim she was editing the original ss when the truth was she would never do such a thing, especially to such a precious pal ... she was also struggling over her lappy to get the messenger working.
Finally, after 10 mins, it worked but lagged real bad. They exchanged SSs. Silence followed. She knew him very well. He was scrutinising every bit of pixel and probably in a phone call with one of their most trusted party partners to discuss at great length something totally ridiculously stupidly unimportant. What happened to their deep-seated trust?
The next day, somehow they managed to meet online and he told her something shocking. His SS showed him his greeting but hers had that part missing. Both were extremely puzzled. Later on in the same day, she consulted another pal who realised the source of the problem - the chat log did not register his greeting line when she coincidentally switched channel at the very point in time. GG. It was a computer 'bug'.
However, before anyone realised that, they had already hurled verbal assaults over the phone. He pointed accusing fingers at her. She cultivated a highly defensive streak. It took them another day to cool off and talk things out. All was eventually settled. The beauty of it was mainly that they now understood each other better. He also told her about his extra faith in her as she stood her ground and that he never had anyone - let alone a girl (ego trip) - who dared to argue with him. They realised they had a far stronger and meaningful friendship.
A simple technical glitch could have actually broken up a wonderful friendship.
Moral of the story: even something as solid can still be wrong. Interpret it yourself. What you perceive as obvious may not actually be so. Thus, the importance of an open mind.
The reason why Lord lost his cool that day was simple. He had become obssessed with Maplestory. He is an intelligent educated person but his personal life had taken a drastic change and affected him quite badly that he threw himself into this game and eventually got hooked. He could not distingush between what was real and what was not. A growing phenomena.
Unknown "Sweetie Julez" Wild
- 16 years, 4 months, 6 days ago