15

Yesterday there were two threads tied as the most active of the day. I'll give the nod to a thread titled, "am I a ‘Karen’ for not wanting my driveway blocked?" which was posted in the "Real Estate" forum. This thread was originally quite a bit longer but I removed several off-topic posts. The original poster says that she lives in a cul-de-sac with limited parking. Three to four days a week, contractors working on her neighbor's home block her driveway with their trucks. In order to pick up her children from school, she has to go over and ask for the trucks to be moved so that she can get out. After this occurred a number of times, her neighbor posted in their Facebook group that she was being a "Karen" and didn't have the right to interrupt the contractors' work. I've often said that DCUM could be be a good topic for someone's PhD thesis because it demonstrates so much about human behavior that could be analyzed and dissected. One characteristic is for posters to respond to posts with little regard for the actual topic, but instead to focus on their own personal crusade of the day. In this case, four posts into the thread a poster chastised the original poster for using the term "Karen". I've written before about how I don't like the name "Karen" being used as a pejorative (and I proposed that it be replaced by "Elon"), but it is clear that the original poster is only using the term because that is what her neighbor called her. If this was somehow too subtle for some readers, the original poster explicitly explained this in a response to the previous poster. Nevertheless, the thread was significantly diverted by posters protesting the use of "Karen". I removed those posts, otherwise this thread would have overwhelmingly been the most active yesterday. The second characteristic of human behavior that might be worth studying is the tendency to — for lack of a better term — nitpick or find fault with the original poster no matter what. While the original poster said that her driveway was being blocked, she also said that sometimes she was able to maneuver her car around the trucks and get out, albeit with some difficulty and only after moving another of her family's cars. One poster latched on to this as evidence that the original poster was, at best, not being truthful and, at worst, was trolling. This really misses the point. The third characteristic demonstrated is the lengths to which some folks will go to excuse bad behavior. One poster agreed with the original poster's neighbor because the contractors don't have anywhere else to park and, therefore, blocking her driveway is understandable and asking them to move is wrong. On the brighter side, several of those responding offered a good solution of purchasing some traffic cones and placing them at the end of her driveway.