One of the standard operating procedures in the online courses I’m taking is that all the class participants have to post a small autobiography so that we can all "get to know each other". An unspoken social convention holds that everybody in the class posts replies to everybody else’s biography, and sometimes some small talk is made around any interesting items.

All too often, the reply is either a simple "hello", or something along the lines of "I’m really looking forward to working with you" that somehow manages to come off as both completely dispassionate and unsettlingly enthusiastic at the same time. Misanthrope that I am, I have avoided replying to these obligatory pieces of boilerplate, and simply slap my canned post up onto the server and participate no further in that thread. I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that few people even bother to read the biographies, anyway.

In my latest class, I resolved to test this. Inserted into the latest version of my biography were a couple of tidbits that I had not previously revealed about myself: one, that at my last job I learned the trade of squid husbandry in addition to systems administration, and also that my left elbow exudes a natural pine scent that has baffled men of science for many years.

Only three people in the class seemed to notice. Nobody else commented on these rather unusual attributes. It’s entirely possible that more people actually read the thing and simply refused my implicit challenge, where I specifically stated that I was now deliberately writing weird things in order to see if anybody really read the biographies, but I strongly suspect that most of my virtual classmates are just going through the motions. For my next class, I’m going to write something completely outré from start to finish, and see how many responses I get. Unless my initial sentence contains some horrifying scatalogical joke, threat of grave violence, or blatantly offensive sexual imagery, I’m guessing that it, too, will pass largely unnoticed.