You're Wrong -- March 2017

One of the greatest gifts the internet has given us is the ability to tell complete strangers they’re wrong, and let’s face it, they often are.

Sometimes they’re so wrong the rest of the internet lines up behind you to tell them exactly how wrong they are. I recently tweeted that a Kiwi job applicant had failed to turn up for a job interview, I then doubled down on that by betting the Uruguayan applicant would be on time. He was and he got the job. For reasons known only to him, a senior Labour MP thought it would be a good idea to tell me my working conditions were so atrocious that Kiwis wouldn’t even apply and I was exploiting immigrant labour with slave wages.

He was wrong, and I felt obliged to tell him so. He didn’t like that and kept arguing, so I let the rest of the internet tell him he was wrong too. It was beautiful to witness: Left, Right and Centrist Twitter were united in the common cause of telling a politician exactly how wrong he was, in great detail, while other politicians chortled from the side lines.

The next day I woke up to an apology tweet where he said he was very sorry for engaging with me (but not quite apologising for what he’d said). The next week Labour issued a directive that all of their MP’s should review their social media and delete anything potentially embarrassing. Nice try, but a friend in Wellington saw a National MP refer to the Twitter spat in one of their speeches. And the internet is forever.

Not all my correcting of the internet has been so successful or satisfying: I’ve been telling people for 3 years now that rainfall is measured in mm, not ml, and yet they persist. Even farmers who should know better continue to use ml, though I’m certain a percentage of those just do it to annoy me.
It’s got to the stage I’ve had to create a hashtag, #splainfall, and write a series of explanatory tweets that I can pull out when needed. I’m sure the readers of this column understand that rainfall is a measurement of depth and not volume so I won’t replicate my tweets here. WeatherWatch took pity on my lonely crusade and enlisted the services of former MetSevice Weather Ambassador Bob McDavitt to help write a tutorial explaining exactly why I am right. Okay, that actually is quite satisfying.

Occasionally someone will try to tell me that I’m wrong. There’s only one way to handle this of course, I covered it in a previous column: I ignore them.