Oh Look, I'm Friends With A Grifter
So a couple of days ago, I look at my twitter feed and see a tweet from a specific friend. Internet friend. We have met once in real life. At one point we were very close. Things have happened and we've drifted apart. Things happen. Interests change. Life happens. In this case she fell into an obsession about the series Supernatural. I'm not talking I love the show I can't miss it. I'm talking she has built an entire twitter presence related tot he show and spends every fan convention weekend (you have NO idea how many of these are until you follow someone like this by the way) tweeting and retweeting stuff and posting links to YouTubes. Now last weekend there was (SHOCK!) a fan con. So my feed was rather polluted. I skim through to see the stuff that is of valid interest (meaning not fan con stuff). But on this day, after days of fan con drivel I see that she's talking about her computer starting to crap out and if someone has an extra they can throw her way she'd appreciate it.
While I could chalk this up as a joke, I can't. Because she's probably serious. Worse, in my eyes, is that someone will probably take care of her. I say this because I have watched people gift her with 'admission' to online access to see concerts given by some of the show's stars. I've seen someone gift her with a t-shirt for a star's charity (meaning the gift giver bought the t shirt that was a donation to the charity and gave her the shirt) and then she spent days arranging for donators to help people who wanted a shirt and couldn't afford it. Now my skeptical side looked at the who t shirt thing and thought 'how do any of you know if these people legitimately can't afford a shirt (charity was for mental health I believe) or if they are merely thinking - hey I can say I can't afford it and get a free shirt out of this.
I will tell you, this particular friend is unemployed. We lost our jobs in a similar time frame 6 years ago. She went back to work before I did. It was a temp job but it was a job. I found permanent employment and moved to take the job (which is not an issue when you are internet friends). Her aging parents both went through serious health crisis. She lost the temp job. She's struggled to find work. She couldn't afford her apartment and moved in with her parents. Lost custody of her daughters. The parents moved and she wound up homeless for a while (she's back with her parents I think at this point). However the permanent job thing has never quite come through. While I realize that the economy is still rather in the tank in some places, I've reached a point where I have to wonder if she'd find a job if she put half the effort into find a job that she places into Twitter. This is someone that I've been in a chat room with and more or less talked off a virtual ledge as she babbled about dying. When the serious addiction to a tv show set in I had to abandon her. I tried. She is beyond my reaching at this point. And her new friends on twitter feed this addiction.
And then when you see her begging (grifting) for a computer and you've learned here to see the signs of grifting, it just makes it even more sad.
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