Lurking somewhere beneath the mouldering edifice that is Voodoologic Headquarters can be found our often-controversial-but-always-interesting Behavioural Sciences Division.

It is within these heavily sound-proofed basement walls that the Voodoologic Team conducts much of its human experimentation research into the challenging question of exactly why the hell do people behave the way they do?

We are, as yet, no closer to a definitive answer, despite years of combined confusion over why some individuals choose to behave like mindless emotional parasites, and particularly why so many other people think that it is very cool when they do.

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It’s hard, maybe even impossible, to get a real sense of someone from a single internet post. It’s even harder when you realise that many people have very different online personas from their real-world personalities.

And yet, every now and then you encounter someone out there in the internet badlands who simply sets your teeth on edge in a way that makes it hard to convince yourself that you’re not seeing a true glimpse of the person festering behind the words.

The Voodoologic Behavioural Sciences Research Team would like to introduce you to Jeff, author of ‘Why You Should Always Log Out’.

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If you take a look at the above link you’ll discover that Jeff’s ‘thing’ [1] is the persecution of people who aren’t careful to log out of online accounts when they’ve finished using public computers.

Jeff is apparently studying at some college or another, and he appears to spend a lot of time using shared computers.

His hobby, while obviously otherwise diligently learning how to make the world a better place [2], is checking computers for user accounts that are still left logged in, and then wreaking havoc with those accounts.

His justification? Well, it appears to be something like, “That’ll teach them to be more careful in future,” or some similar kind of self-serving nonsense like that. But you don’t have to read too far into Jeff’s post to realise that this is simply a paper-thin veneer over his true motivations. Jeff likes to punish people who have done him no harm, in ways those people will probably never understand they enabled through a little bit of carelessness.

***

I like to think that as we get older, most of us go through enough formative life experiences to learn a lesson similar to, “What goes around, comes around.” Or perhaps, “Do unto others…” Or even, “Karma, dude.”

It’s not the most eloquently expressed sentiment in the world, but it reminds me of George Costanza’s oft-anguished cry of, “You know, we’re living in a society here!”

We are living in a society, and one of the few things that makes dealing with all of the grinding annoyances and disappointments that come our way is the hope that others will show a little compassion at those times when we’re vulnerable.

***

Jeff likes to mess with people’s college enrolments. He can sense the need to send a young woman’s father the kind of email that would horrify any parent to receive. And vandalising relationships? Full steam ahead, baby!

Of course, if Jeff hadn’t been, well, essentially emotionally retarded, it might have occurred to him that he could have simply emailed these people a little note that read something like:

Hi,

You left your email / enrolment page / facebook account / whatever logged in when you finished using the computer at college today.

You should be careful about logging out of these sites when you finish using them, because another person could probably cause you some embarrassment or inconvenience if they decided to play games with your information.

Just to let you know, I logged you out of the account this time, so hopefully nothing bad happened while it was still logged in (but you might want to check, all the same).

All the best,

A Good Samaritan

Or, let’s say that no email address is available. He could perhaps have taken the bold move to simply log that person out, and hope that it was a one-off oversight on their part. I know, we all want to sit down and rock back-and-forth while we consider the revolutionariness of that particular suggestion.

Jeff, however, has righteous indignation on his side. And, let’s face it, in the direction of simply being helpful there are no vindictive giggles at another person’s expense to be had. This is how we know that for all his claims that “to some extent I feel bad,” and, “I questioned doing it for a solid 15 minutes,” Jeff is pretty much what we like to describe in the Behavioural Sciences Industry as an “asshole”.

***

It’s good advice. You should be careful about logging out of online applications when you finish using a shared computer.

Unfortunately, there are people like Jeff in the world. They will take advantage of you. They will gloat about it publically. They will think they did something funny and cool, as opposed to abusive and immature.

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RECOMMENDED TREATMENT: A radical, extended course of life experiences, culminating in the realisation that the next time you make a mistake [3] you will be hoping like crazy that people will treat you better than you deserve.