#might keep this girl as a character

i grew up a screw-up

Story time!

A few months ago, a skype video chat request popped up on my screen out of the blue. I nearly accepted it (one of my friends was notorious for doing this unsolicited at the time) before realizing that it was no one that I knew. I was pretty new to using skype, so I wasn’t aware that strangers could ping me in this way.

I tried to ignore it, wait for it to time out, but the tone kept sounding for an annoyingly long time and the call persisted. Eventually, I clicked decline, only for another video chat request to immediately spring up. I declined it again, and another insistently popped up in almost the same beat. This went on for six or seven iterations before I finally got fed up.

Like I said, I was new to skype and was not only unsure about how to block this person in between the frightening barrage of chat requests, but I was also morbidly curious as to what they wanted from me. I didn’t actually have much on my profile, just my name (which I quickly deleted after this ordeal) my age (ditto), and a shitty cartoon representation of me as my icon. So I sent this person a message over the chatroom system like ‘who the fuck are you.’

Unsurprisingly, it ended up being a dude. He apologized profusely for bothering me, said he only was looking for friends. I did not accept his contact request, despite his wheedling for me to do so. He said he was 25. (His skype profile said he was 38.) Our conversation started out cordial enough; we talked about respective employments, our favorite cities. Then he professed his love to me. (Of course.) Then he started badgering me for pictures of myself, nude or otherwise. I’d refuse to, and he would apologize, we’d change topics, but he’d consistently steer the conversation back to him asking for pictures of me. I quickly got pissed off.

Eventually, tired of refusing his demands for selfies, I started sending him pictures back. Pictures of my favorite sniper rifles. (I’ve been fascinated by war aesthetic since I was little, sorry.) When his simpering request for just one picture of me came through for the umpteenth time, I dropped an image of a PGM Ultima Ratio I got off google into the fileshare box. He accepted the file eagerly and immediately. Then silence.

'What is this?’ he asked. I told him what it was, why it was my favorite, chattered enthusiastically about range and ammo and specifications. He laughed it off as a joke, asked me what I really looked like. I sent him a picture of a SAKO TRG-42. This continued sporadically over the course of several hours. I must have sent him over fifty pictures of guns I liked, blank files that he accepted with increasingly manic desperation in the hopes of finally seeing a picture of me. His messages became discernibly nervous. I cluttered his inbox with pictures of ordnance.

He finally blocked me after I sent him an image of a Barrett M82 laid out in the desert, in response to one of his feeble demands for me to finally show my face. It’s one of the most hilarious things that has happened to me to this day.