"Watch out everybody, a white van was spotted in such and such street" and other such pointless panic-mongery

[ImNotACat]

AIBU to be totally fucking sick of the "warnings" on local social media about absolutely bloody nothing?

Yeah, you saw a white van. OMFG the driver got out and left something on a doorstep then took a photo Perhaps he's a delivery driver you thick drama llama.

And what? An Asian woman with glasses was taking photos of an empty house on your street?? Quick, log it with the police. She must be up to something. Or maybe, just maybe, she's a fucking estate agent?

A car drove slowly past as you walked your dog? Yes, BECAUSE ITS POURING and the driver was probs trying to avoid soaking you as they went through puddles.

A van was seen driving very slowly round Labyrinth Close with 2 men in the front peering at the front doors 😱 That would be because the numbers are arranged in some bizarre configuration that makes no sense and it's basically impossible to find your way around if you haven't been before. Every time I have to drop something off to that estate (I do local deliveries for work sometimes) I expect to see a post about a badly dressed woman driving a rustbucket and staring into people's gardens 🤣

I mean I know IABU to care about Facebook really but it's infuriating watching people getting so worked up about fuck all.

We have 2 warring local Facebook groups.

One is run by a militant ex pat who impose 9billion rules and hasn't lived in the area for years!

The other is run by the people he threw out in his first cull 😂

There are regular snidey posts from both sides about the other group.

We have a resident ambulance chaser who reposts every piece of breaking news, updates us all on new legislation and has recently started to give reviews of her lockdown visits to local shops 🤣 she used to do cafes but obvs that's a bit hard right now. She was trying for delivery afternoon tea reviews but the shop ones include how covid aware people are, so make better gossip!

The casual racism is astounding, all hell breaks lose whenever the travellers park up anywhere in the area.

I do love the drama and it's a great place to find out what new shops are opening locally 😂

Yes curtain twitching and making up rubbish is rife on social media ...there are a lot of bored people out there

@Goldieloxx

We have a local lady who rings people's doorbells in the evening, presumably she is desperate and after money. The way people react you'd think she was an axe maniac and you get so much abuse if you calmly suggest that they simply don't answer the door

There's a lady in our small town who has quite severe addiction (possibly mental health) issues. She approaches people in the street asking for money and the local Facebook page goes bananas about her. Lots of comments about 'bringing back hanging' and things even less liberal than that.

To my knowledge, she's never been threatening or aggressive but god forbid a vulnerable person, living a life of misery should be treated with compassion or sympathy...

@Cantaloupeisland

Or the 'accident on the main road, hope nobody seriously hurt, thoughts and prayers' etc which roughly translates as 'oooo what's happened?!'

In the case of the one where my brother was killed, that led to tales of his brains and blood smeared over the course of about a half mile.

He didn't bleed at all.

Thanks to you all I joined Nextdoor and I am happy/sad to not see any of the posts like these here😂
Kind of wanted drama, but kind of happy people around are normal😂

@ImNotACat those fife dogs bloody go missing all the time and head down to Plymouth dontcha know 😂

We live rurally and have a local whatsapp group. A few weeks ago DH was working on his bike in the front yard and our neighbour took a photo of him and posted it in the chat with the message 'Man who resembles homeowner Mr Splendid of Splendid house is seen at Splendid house stealing Mr Splendid's bike parts' then 5 minutes later, after neighbours arrive to see what's going on, he clarifies 'Mr Splendid Look-alike is actually Mr Splendid'...

@SplendidSuns1000

We live rurally and have a local whatsapp group. A few weeks ago DH was working on his bike in the front yard and our neighbour took a photo of him and posted it in the chat with the message 'Man who resembles homeowner Mr Splendid of Splendid house is seen at Splendid house stealing Mr Splendid's bike parts' then 5 minutes later, after neighbours arrive to see what's going on, he clarifies 'Mr Splendid Look-alike is actually Mr Splendid'...

I've had to stop reading local community forums due to this. I'm convinced they curtain twitch all day so as to pass on the most inane 'warnings'.

I think the latest is queues of white van men at a cafe sitting and eating their breakfast - shock horror!

They're not, of course. They're buying takeaway breakfast, 2 at a time in shop; cafe is on the main road so it's plain to see. But that's not interesting news neither is it a chance to diss a local business.

We also get lots of open letter type messages such as “to the woman in the grey Passat who went round Fanny Way like it was Silverstone race track......." usually combined with a reg plate photo*

Yep. Standard.

Those local Facebook pages are amazing, I’ve been a keen voyeur of ours for years.

The other day some woman was on complaining about kids playing outside her window all day every weekend whilst she’s trying to study, and asked the parents to be more considerate. Turns out the room she was using faces out onto a huge play park that’s in the middle of the estate

There’s another one on our local group who lives on the main road through the estate, where they’ve just installed one of those speed monitor signs that’s tells you how fast you’re driving. She spends an hour a day recording the speeds of all the cars that pass and tells us the average speed, as well as who was the slowest and who was the fastest.

Someone near me in the north west was posting about a missing dog in Oklahoma.

I've just realised that DH and I must have been on some group like this few years ago when we were buying a house😂
We drove to the street and parked on a corner where we could see most of 2 streets few evenings to see if there are any loud party houses😂

@HippyChickMama

This is the best Nextdoor post ever, walking on my labia 🤣

OMG, that made me laugh in a way that made my DH ask if I was choking.

@ImNotACat

It's always a "foreign" or "Eastern European" man, sometimes "one of our travelling friends". Like you can tell through a windscreen

Remember a few years ago it used to be "asylum seekers" at the root of all suspicious behaviour

Let's Get This Toy Back To It's Owner
I Bet There's A Child Who Won't Sleep 2Nite Without It

It's from a sodding Happy Meal and has clearly been chucked from the car window

We had a woman get the right arse the other week because someone took a dead cat they found to the local vet instead of calling her.
She was some self styled dead cat rescuer with her own scanner and obviously everyone should have known to call her and not the vet.

Nobody had a clue who she was.

Well now you know. She needs business cards, may I suggest 'the dead pussy whisperer'.

Let's Get This Toy Back To It's Owner
I Bet There's A Child Who Won't Sleep 2Nite Without It

Precededed or followed by Share The Hell Out Of This Post

The person that runs my local Facebook page is very high and mighty. Just an awful person. I wish someone else could run it.
He regularly takes posts down if people don't agree with the poster. Which I think is silly. Surely people can have their opinion

We had one "black man spotted hiding in bushes on corner of XXX Road" (embellished a bit more than that).

It was a man who had lived in the town 25+ years putting his bins out. The post was done by new comers.

For my sins I admin our local FB group. I was invited by the founder of the group because I gave 'sensible' responses to people's comments. I declined to ask how shallow the pool he was fishing in was to get to me 😁

I can spot a fight about to break out at 20 paces. I know exactly what comments are going to get reported. I try and meditate before it descends into full on arguments and then get private messaged with criticism about not letting people have their say if I turn off commenting because what they were about to say was going to cause a riot on the playing fields

Some people say stuff to what is essentially their neighbours that they wouldn't dream of saying in real life. And use it as their personal dirty laundry airing forum. And when I suggest if they have a problem with the person who was standing too close to them in the post office with the blonde hair, red coat and silver nails that they might like to mention it at the time rather than on the local group I get frosty responses. The particular woman who took most offence at this alleged curbing of free speech flounced from the local group and another group I admin for DC with her DC's condition. But in the end she realised she was only hurting herself because she missed out on local gossip and useful parenting advice. So I magnanimously accepted her membership requests

My hometown Facebook page shut down when the admin went to prison for waging a particularly nasty stalking campaign against a woman. He was a vile misogynist who delighted in naming and shaming women who'd had wardrobe malfunctions after a few drinks and posting the photos for all to see so it wasn't a huge shock.

We constantly get the helicopter posts here too. We have a military base and are a coastal town so it's usually coastguard or military practice.

Because of the base we also get a lot of "did anyone hear that noise, it sounded like gunfire" every single time they're practising. The best one was a few weeks ago when someone complained about night practice and said they should stop as soon as it gets dark so they don't disturb all the children in bed. This was in the middle of winter and I don't think it was even that late when it was going on.

Apart from that it's all the same dog poo/weird van with a man with an "Eastern European" or "Irish" accent/mark on a wall/elastic band on the pavement type things everyone else gets.

I do remember one person years ago wondering about the weird marks all along a path when she left her house one morning and how it must have been burglars marking houses overnight. Local kids had been playing with chalk the day before, drawing and writing their names, some of it had worn off after a rain shower so it was just parts of words and the edges of smiley faces etc.

People with horses who think their hobby is more important than everyone and everything else.