I Love You All Really

One thing I’ll be happy to leave behind on Facebook is these gorram personality tests that seem to pop up at an alarming rate. Now I’m not having a go at the people who fill them in and take up screen space like a fat person on an airplane (I am, but a lot of you are my friends and I don’t want you to think that I’m insulting you. Even though I am.) because I fill in a lot of them as well out of idle boredom (so I’m insulting myself too). The idea behind these things is that you can answer about 20 multiple choice questions and hey presto! the clever internet will give you a complete rundown of your personality. It will give you an insightful profile of you as a person and your inner most thoughts and beliefs by comparing you to an animal from the forthcoming movie The Golden Compass (Northern Lights to everyone in the UK. The first person to moan about this gets an angry e-mail from me). These things have been around since I were lad on ‘puter at age of 13, and they still persist to this day.

The main problem with them is the questions. These tend to go along the lines of:

Q. 2093887849. You are trapped in a burning building. You…

• run through the fire, killing crazed zombie ninjas as you go, rescuing everyone in the building and generally kicking arse, making witty quips and just generally being brilliant. (Answer this if you want to be compared to the generic ‘Strong, confident, heroic, gets on well with other people, loves to party’ personality type.)

• laugh manically at how genius you were to think up this incredibly insane way to slaughter lots of innocent souls with precious fire and your crazed zombie ninjas. (Answer this for ‘Clever, resourceful, hard working and thoughtful’ comparison.)

• curl up in a panic ball and wait for the flames to take you away. Get turned into a crazed zombie ninja and decapitated by ‘Hero’. (Answer this for ‘generally unlucky/shit’ comparison.)

• think that the fire is within yourself and you’re just burning up (Answer this for ‘emo fuck’. This is usually the most popular one.)

• think the point’s been made.

and it’s that everyone has some vague idea of what they’re like, or what they want to be like, and only a blind three-legged dog wouldn’t be able to work out which answer they should give to get the personality type they expect and want anyway. I’ve started to ignore the questions and just pick whichever character description I think best fits me and then sit back content at another two minutes wasted.

If you’re the kind of person who does these things because you think they offer a deep insight into your inner psyche and they guide you on your day to day path then you’re probably the same kind of person who takes their horoscopes seriously ergo I hate you. If you’re just someone who does it because you’re oh so bored with having nothing to do then fukkit. It’s just been bugging me.

What actually kills a small part of me every time I see it isn't when people tell me what a computer program thinks of them, it’s when people tell me what they think of themselves. Fucking questionnaires. All those pricks who fill them in time after time, always making pathetic excuses for why they're filling in 'just one more'*. Now I’m all for finding out about someone’s favourite music, or how their year’s been, or whether they’ve ever fallen in love, or what their favourite film is, and everything else about them that makes them them*, and not just face to face either. I can quite happily read about someone’s thoughts or life in an e-mail or on a blog, but not from answers to stupid fucking questionnaires that are as inane as they are long and shallow. Or am I just exposing myself as a prick for not properly reading anyone else’s?