I would rather be a hermit than talk to fucking stupid idiots.

I don't understand why people insist on writing like retards on the internet, in text messages and on instant messenger. I'm neither old, daft or resistant to technology - I can even construct basic html (even though it often fucks up because I spell colour with a u and apparently the world wide web is American) - but I cannot understand this new stupid version of English that threatens to engulf the world and will have the eventual terrible outcome of de-potty-training us all. Obviously there is no scientific fact that backs up my hypothesis but human de-evolution is likely if we lose the ability to at least appear more intelligent than dolphins, no?

I have a rather common messenger address. I created it about a decade ago and miraculously still use it. Due to this common address, rather like Paris Hilton's vadge, I have been mistakenly been contacted by many people, mostly teenagers. When I was a teenager, the closest you got to meeting strangers was at a weekend party you crashed and only had the courage to talk to anyone because you were drunk and it was only slightly less embarrassing to ask where the bathroom was than spew on the carpet in the corner. Now, however, I'm being contacted by a veritable army of seemingly ill-educated little dipshits. They can neither spell, construct a sentence correctly or communicate politely with a stranger. The youth of today! I'm not sure if it's peer pressure or just plain teenage rebellion against educators, but it seems that this generation of teenagers and young adults are purposefully turning themselves into extremely dumb and quite possibly useless individuals. (No wonder President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" policy isn't working, you can't fight progress.) Even worse are the adults who were normal, functioning, even contributing members of society, who could spell and could interact in social environs with ease and now they are suddenly deciding to devolve and join the ranks of the ever growing illiterate army. Old men with pony tails and expensive ripped designer jeans- fine, if you must. Becoming deliberately daft to connect to the youth of today? Oh please.

When contacted by strange youth through instant messenger, I can barely resist the urge to ridicule them with large words and lecture them on stranger danger. Oh hell, I don't even attempt to, I just launch right in. A conversation lasts approximately two minutes until I want to throw my laptop at a wall because they are so fucking dumb. Really. Anyway, at this point I tell them that I am possibly too old to be talking to them as they haven't yet learnt the basic constructs of the English language and therefore it might be inappropriate (uh, ever heard of paedophiles?) and shouldn't they be at school? Or doing homework? Or possibly with a tutor who might be able to help them with their language skills? And why are they on the internet at such a young age contacting strangers? Where are your parents? When they proceed to berate me in their idiotic language with the basic eloquence of a sixteen year old with a bad case of acne (albeit it takes me quite a while to figure out what they are attempting to say in the first place so this process of discovering they are actually sixteen can take a while) it tends to upset me quite a bit. When did it become commonplace for teenagers to be so fucking rude? Yes, of course, teenagers have always been like that, myself not excepted. But at least we kept our evil mutterings to ourselves and only had an aura of evil malaise! I know that I at least could conduct a conversation with any of my parents' friends when forced to, and I was even polite to strangers who asked me the time. But to contact a complete stranger over the internet and then roundly abuse them for not revealing name, age, sex and bank account details?! What has happened to the veneer of respect?

I'm too pissed off to write anything else. Except that it makes me even more angry when people my own age (mid twenties) insist on communicating like illiterate fuckwits.

(I'm not even editing this piece. My soul is aching and my dignity threatens to collapse and the next thing you know I will be a BBC reporter yelling at Scientologists over the idiocy of it all . . . but I will stop here.)