Cyber Stalkers

... or perhaps more accurately I should entitle this as cyber hasslers.

A bit of history first off: I have been into penpalling since days eons (at least it seems that way) before computing ever took off and it required, thought, tact, intelligence and a reasonable grasp of the other persons natural language. This last was my main reason for sticking with English speaking penpals and to be fair, my penpals mostly came from personal knowledge. What does that mean ... simply that I already knew the person to whom I was writing as a friend or at the very least 'a mate'.

Since then, many things have intervened for me to lose contact with most of these folks such as leaving school, getting married, moving country, lack of replies and so on and I then moved on to 'doing my penpals via eMail'. This in itself produced issues and broadly fall into the following categories ....

1. I become the next best buddy to mail all your crap too - no, I don't want to see the dancing frogs AGAIN.
2. We become, through no lack of effort on my part, occasional 'how are youers' because you don't know what it means to build a relationship yet you get offended if I stop writing.
3. We hit it off such that we feel like we know each other intimately and have been best buddies since the year dot.
4. You are a total fruitcake and stalk / hassle me non stop.

I can cope with those who fall into the 1's, I just filter your email into the bit bucket. Likewise those of you in the 2's are teetering on the verge of being auto-deleted, it is simply a matter of how often you write me two lines and then complain that I only wrote 30. Those in category 3 ... I need more of you, I love you all .... and finally category 4, the cyber nutters.

I have a long standing principle with my penpals ... on first contact I tell them up front what I am like (yes grumpy, yes boring at times, but get to know me and I'll be a lifelong friend who'll fight tooth and nail for you) and I make one, note it well only 1 guarantee. And that is that I won't just disappear without a trace unless I can't avoid it but don't take my silence as not wanting to write, just my life at present precludes me from being able to do so.

So I have this one, whom no matter how often I remind them, insists on ending the friendship because I don't care, don't like them, have no thought for their feelings and so on. So after >15 attempts over a period of a year to say don't be so silly I have finally had it. So I told them ... I'm not fighting you or your perceptions anymore and this is goodbye ... since then I've had at least 2 eMails a day asking me to tell them to f%*@ off, to forgive them, to give them another chance, that I ate them, etc ..... if this continues I'll just set up a filter to push them straight into the bit bucket or maybe one cruel step further I'll just re-route the mail back to them.

C'est la vie