So today I walked into my English class and discovered that we were going to be spending the whole day setting up a Wordpress blog for ourselves for future assignments. I figured that since we're in the year 2013 the majority of college students would be quite familiar with the whole process and I was up for a pretty slow lecture.
I was wrong.
As my professor began walking us through the process of how to create a Wordpress account - yes, seriously, this story begins with typing in your email address and hitting a button - shit immediately hit the fan. A good 40% of our class was unable to successfully complete this task, and "Teh sitez is broken z0mg LEL!1" rang throughout the classroom.
As the class continued, more and more people became lost as my professor explained the basic processes of things like making a post, clicking a check-box for privacy, and making a title.
To give you examples of the sort of things I was listening to while this was all going on, I began jotting down actual quotes in my notebook (instead of, you know, taking class notes)...
"How do you get to your own blog again?"
"How do you get the link in your email?"
"What is a URL?"
"Where do you get the URL?"
Keep in mind that these are actual quotes.
I thought back to the thousands of PM's and help threads involving similar issues that I've had to solve for people over the years. It was at this moment that I realized I needed to make a decision - to use my knowledge for good to help others in their time of need, or to sit back and laugh at the hilarity of the entire situation.
It was at this moment that something odd happened. People that are bilingual often describe the magical time where you first realize that you are actually thinking in your second language. Well, as I gazed on upon the dozens of confused classmates, flustered professor, and technology-illiterate whoo-girls, a single thought entered into my mind.
It was not a coherent sentence, mind you. It was just this single gif...
It was at this moment in my life that I realized that I had officially become fully fluent and integrated in the internet.
After coming upon this realization, I looked back and chuckled to myself over the previous "use my knowledge for good/evil" dilemma - how could I have even considered there to be an option?
I proceeded to then sit back and thoroughly enjoy the mass chaos that was unfolding before my eyes over these simplistic tasks, all the while pleasurably keeping the knowledge that could fix all of the issues people were experiencing to my smug self.