People can be cruel. Let’s face it. You innocently stumble upon a complete strangers blog, offer a genuinely flavoured racist slur and call them a name when they respond a little too defensively, and before you know it they are calling you “a Troll”. Ow, that hurts, people.

But what if it’s true? What if all these years you have been innocently Trolling on the internet and you just didn’t know? Well as a public service to you, i want to share with you Five Signs to Help you Realise that you Just Might be a Troll.

[1] If you live under a bridge, you may be a Troll. And by “live under a bridge” i mean in your mom’s house, and you’re over thirty-five, and your favourite food is take-away. From last night.

briedge

[2] If you have a difference of opinion with someone and attack them as a person aggressively in response, you may be a Troll. Someone not thinking the same way as you on an issue does not instantly make them an idiot [they may still be, though] and if your instant reaction is to insult or attack them rather than arguing the point, that is often a sign that your argument/belief is not strong enough to be backed and so you try to distract by moving the attention somewhere else.

john

[3] If, when someone refuses to share your link promoting the saving of Orangutans, you rant on about how they are a horrible human being, and then befriend their wife on social media and try to convince her that you are an evil, animal-hating neanderthal [this actually happened], you may be a Troll.

Sometimes someone refusing to share the link you want them to promote, might not even mean they actually hate Orangutans. Or any other animals. Maybe they simply get a hundred requests a day to promote things and they have chosen that your thing is one thing too many. Leave their poor wife alone, lady.

orang

[4] If you choose any labels other than the person’s name you are arguing with to address them as, you may be a Troll. Surprisingly enough, while ‘Dick’ is the acceptable shortened form of the name Richard, it is not, in fact, also the shortened form of the name ‘Brett’, ‘Simon’, ‘Matthew’ or ‘Robert’. If you disagree with someone online and call them names rather than their name, there is a chance that you are it!

sdick

[5] When the name, picture or email address you are using does not correspond directly to your name, face, email address, you might just be a Troll. Let’s face it, if you can’t say the thing you want to say as yourself, then the alarm bells are going off. If you are having to create whole new email addresses and reroute them through the former Soviet Republic so that no-one can track down your ip address, you really might want to consider the probability.

Sometimes, you just have to concede, that maybe, just maybe, the dodgy oke or okess, is actually you. i will leave it to David Mitchell of That Mitchell and Webb look to lead you a little further down the path of self-discovery:

Please SHARE this with your people, if you enjoyed it at all [or maybe recognised some of them]

[You may likely appreciate some of these other FUNNY lists as well, click here]