Posters bogged down in minor/irrelevant detail

[StillCoughingandLaughing]

I know it’s not a big issue (although someone will probably still reply to say ‘Is that really all you’ve got to worry about?’), but is anyone else being driven mad by how often threads get completely derailed by a minor detail - to the point you get more questions and comments about that than the actual issue?

I don’t want to make this into a TAAT, but a couple of examples:

There was a woman whose husband had claimed she was being rude because she’d had a glass of wine while cooking and hadn’t come to find him in a different room on the other side of the house to offer him one. The OP happened to mention that the wine had been open for about three days - basically to emphasise that they weren’t big drinkers. Cue post after post about ‘You leave wine open for three days?!’ ‘That wine will be undrinkable!’ ‘Actually wine is okay for about a week once opened’. ‘No, it says on the bottle drink within three days, and even that’s too long IMO’. It doesn’t matter!!! Answer the bloody question!!

An older one I found the other day - a dieting woman desperately wanted a treat day at Burger King. Instead her husband made her a bacon and egg sandwich so that he wouldn’t have to go out again. Again, genuine answers to the question bogged down with ‘Why didn’t you just get the BK while you were out shopping?’ ‘Didn’t you smell the bacon cooking?’ ‘What were you doing while he was making the sandwich? Didn’t you wonder where he was?’ It. Doesn’t. MATTER!!!!

Why?! Why can’t people answer a simple question without picking over minor bits of the carcass? At worst, I feel it’s low-level, disguised troll hunting. People don’t want to say outright ‘You’re a liar and I don’t believe you’ for fear of getting their posts deleted or being banned - so instead, they find fault with a minor detail, hoping to imply that this tiny discrepancy means the entire post is an invention. I suppose ‘Why did it take you 30 minutes to walk back and collect the bag you’d forgotten when you said it only took you 20 minutes to get home? ’ leaves much more room for ambiguity than ‘This is the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard in my life’...

3 days? unbelievable.

tomato or brown sauce on the bacon and egg sandwich I wonder?

I don't think you understand what AIBU, and MN, actually is.

I don't think you're literally driven mad OP, it's a bit insensitive to say so.

Does it really matter though?

Huh, it took you 20 mins to walk home.

Only takes me 10 mins. You must be a slow walker

I don't think you're literally driven mad OP, it's a bit insensitive to say so.

In MN speak I wouldn’t be ‘driven’ mad - I’d be ‘ferried about’

Sometimes there's so much irrelevant detail in a thread it's hard not to notice it. I would quite like bullet points personally.

It's a conversation with lots and lots of people talking, of course it's going to get messy sometimes and go off in odd directions. That's the beauty of human interaction. As long as people aren't excessively rude or abusive then no one gets to police what people say, apart from mn admin. I like the fluidity and randomness of it.

@StillCoughingandLaughing it drives me mad too and it feels like a type of trolling via deliberately derailing a person’s thread. The shitty part is that happens on threads where people are genuinely seeking help or are in distress. Some people just can’t help themselves though and proceed to kick the OP when they’re down. It’s horrible and frustrating to watch. And then when you try to call it out you’re acerbically accused of being the “thread police”. 🙄 Gross.

Or sometimes the lack of detail can be quite hilarious.

I’m devastated, my DH didn’t get me a birthday present.

Six pages later the OP reappears to add, He’s in ITU.

I agree OP, but am finding the replies here really funny

@MatildaTheCat

Or sometimes the lack of detail can be quite hilarious.

I’m devastated, my DH didn’t get me a birthday present.

Six pages later the OP reappears to add, He’s in ITU.

It's either feast or famine. There's either a post with so much irrelevant detail it's impossible to establish what the actual problem is (justified as not wanting to be accused of dripfeeding usually) or so little detail it's as if they pressed post too soon.

But what about the covid bubble, op!

Don't think I've seen a thread which hasn't had a covid derail .

Normally doesn’t bother me. Been on here ages and you can see the details that are going to set people off on tangents. One upset me recently a lady describing her husband being verbally abusive as she was driving - clearly someone who spoke English as a second language and using a very well known road name that some southern posters had never heard of. Turned out she was being physically and verbally abused. Must have taken a lot to post in first place and first replies were snarky about her English.

Then there are the covid tangents - the thread is not necessarily about a covid issue but we get the pearl clutchers who cry “but we are in lockdown!” which derails the conversation.

When a) not all the UK is - sorry I know there is another thread about that or b) as I saw earlier where the OP quoted $ in her post so quite clear she was not in the UK

How could the dieting woman opt for Burger King rather than McDonalds A 'treat day' sounds like something you'd organise for a child.

@Sparklingbrook

Sometimes there's so much irrelevant detail in a thread it's hard not to notice it. I would quite like bullet points personally.

One of my favourites was about an unsatisfactory pizza delivery. But the OP was so worried about being judged for ordering takeaway pizza that she posted several paragraphs about how hard her day had been to justify her decision to order her family a pizza.

Of course, she was told off for irrelevant detail.

God, I love AIBU.

It's a conversation with lots and lots of people talking, of course it's going to get messy sometimes and go off in odd directions. That's the beauty of human interaction.

There’s nothing beautiful about ten pages of ‘But how did you even get chocolate at 10pm when you said on a thread three years ago that your local shop burned down? ’ when all the OP wanted to know was if she should have shared her Cadbury’s Caramel.

AIBU=Petty Gripes.

Some of the "christmas bubble" posts are exhausting.

Long, long lists of relatives and assorted hangers on with details of who had an extra cherry in their Snowball in 1987, and why Auntie Maud can't sit on a hard chair for more than 15 minutes (insert irrelevant details of historic surgical procedure).

The answer is always "either do it or don't do it, it's up to you".

"either do it or don't do it, it's up to you". That's about the top and bottom of it. Most of the time you get the impression they are going to do it anyway but fancied winding up some randoms on the internet first.

I cannot abide it when two posters get into a random back and forth argument for pages and pages over a misunderstanding of what one of them meant. Often with several flounces but then coming back for more because they absolutely must have the last word. It always seems to be on the threads where the OP desperately needs help.

I don't know, there are a hell of a lot of completely bollocks threads around at the moment that can be unpicked by one small detail that doesn't add up.
I think there must be a lot of extremely bored trolls, this last two weeks especially.