Winning and Losing
We spent the greater part of yesterday evening sitting in a packed auditorium at the big school in town – watching a local celebrity hand out awards to students throughout the school. Of course our main reason for being there was to watch Miss 14 receive an award for her cooking exploits. A local celebrity spent his evening handing over awards, before making a speech to the children present about hard work, and perseverance.
After the official part of the awards evening finished, we made our way through to the sixth form common rooms, where food and drinks had been laid on, and spent perhaps an hour chatting with teachers and parents – and hiding from parents we really didn’t want to happen upon.
I even got to spend a few minutes talking to the local celebrity (I’m not going to name him, but I will say he won Strictly, and starred in a well known hospital drama on the BBC for several years). It was pretty amusing really – my other half really only knows him as the Dad of one of the children at the school where she works – and it struck me while making conversation how awkward social interaction must be for well known actors – because invariably the people they meet know quite a lot about them on the way into the conversation. I wonder if they have to try and figure out if somebody knows their work, or they just presume nobody does?
Anyway – we finally got home late in the evening, put the kids to bed, and chilled out for a bit. While wandering between rooms doing this and that, I happened to look in on Miss 17, and discovered her crouched in the corner of her room, staring at her phone.
“What’s wrong!?”
Over the course of the next hour, a story of jealousy, nastiness, revenge, and retribution unfolded. The person Miss 17 had ended a relationship with a few weeks previously had been trying to gain her attention via Snapchat. I helped end the conversation – suggesting that instead of showing any anger, responding with a simple “Goodbye”, and then not responding would be the best course of action. If nothing else, it would take the high ground, and expose further attempts to start a fight as the desperate attempts to seek attention that they almost certainly were.
We didn’t expect what happened next. Suddenly my daughter’s snapchat account was posting horrific messages to her friends. It turned out this same person had the login details for her account. I can imagine why – it comes straight out of the controlling/manipulating playbook, doesn’t it – it must have been extorted at some point during their relationship.
Over the next few minutes I helped lock down all of her social media accounts – changing passwords, switching on two factor authentication, and so on. Then we set about apologising to her friends, and explaining what had happened.
How or why does somebody do something like that though? How can somebody be so self obsessed and blinkered that they don’t imagine their actions will be immediately exposed? It left me kind of dumbfounded.