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I have to be within 3 feet of a woman at work: A MGTOW tale of terror

A MGTOW learns he will be working with a woman

By David Futrelle

The good gentlemen who make up the Men Going Their Own Way movement talk about women rather a lot — mostly because they hate them so much.

Most of this discussion is rather theoretical — endless speculations on the evils of “female nature” and the devious plots by feminists and male simps to reduce men to chattel. That sort of thing.

But sometimes one of these female creatures impinges on the life of a MGTOW in an up-close-and-personal way.

Today, fresh from the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, I bring you the terrifying tale of one innocent MGTOW who has just learned that his until-now all-male sanctum at work is about to be invaded by … a female.

Well, he doesn’t put it quite so politely.

My work mostly revolves around maintaining records, preserving old books and documents. Our department is always swamped , with us 3 guys doing all the work but hr decided that we need a c*nt to bright up our days.

And now, he says,

I am afraid for my future.

My usual plan to deal with females is this..

1. Be Curt and to the point. No extra talking other than what is relevant to the work at hand.

2. Always in the view of a camera and other employees.

3. Maintain at least a furniture in between or wall or a distance of at least 3 feet. I get away with this by saying I have allergies to perfume and they don’t want to be the splash zone. Huehuehue

And it seems like a solid plan: act like a complete weirdo whenever a woman enters the room, rushing to find the nearest piece of furniture to hide behind like she’s some sort of active shooter, but armed with false accusations instead of an assault rifle.

But alas, it turns out he has to actually train her a little, which means he’ll have to enter inside the 3-foot female proximity danger zone — and he’s afraid the additional cameras he had his employers put up on a flimsy pretext won’t be enough to protect him.

I am afraid as this work requires to be in close enough proximity to the other person to show nitty gritties like applying wet tissue paper to the page and making it translucent with a chemical.

Please help. She starts working with us next week.

Had Mr. AndroidMetroid asked these questions anywhere else but an MGTOW safe space, it’s likely that his COMPLETELY LEGITIMATE CONCERNS would have been dismissed as “the paranoid delusions of a terrified, woman-hating baby man” or “the cringiest shit I’ve ever seen” or “what the fuck are you even talking about, dude, you’re going to be working with a woman, not a giant angry bear.”

But happily the readers of the MGTOW subreddit understand the grave danger that Mr. AndroidMetroid is in, and they’ve offered him many helpful suggestions that were definitely not hysterical and/or possibly illegal overreactions that could possibly get him fired.

“Bring your own camera,” one commenter suggested.

Bring a voice recorder. Who cares if recording someone’s voice without their permission is illegal. It’s better to be guilty of that than being guilty of rape.

Another suggested that he not allow her near him unless there’s someone else present who can vouch for him.

Never have any dealings with her without a witness present.

Document your encounters with her somewhere accessible only to you. (Time, place, duration, reason)

And watch out for her devious lady scheming!

Expect her to begin ‘grooming’ that is to say, she will attempt to cultivate one or both other males in the department as allies against you if she doesn’t perceive you as an available avenue to greater status or resources.

Still another helpful MGTOW Redditor, a fellow by the name of PressNeinForGerman, advised our poor soon-to-be mentor to make an effort to not appear human.

I suggest you pretty much act like a robot.

And not just any robot, a snooty robot, “cold and unwelcoming.”

The only danger here is that if you act too standoffish, she might end up falling in love with you, because women just love aloof jerks — as any Red Pill men man will tell you, at great length. So you need to go a little bit beyond aloof to “actively disgusted.”

Strait up ignore her. Ignore her in the way you would the homeless man scratching his asshole on the public bus; with slight disgust and haste to “get the ride over with and get out of there”.

I’m sure HR would be delighted to hear that Mr. AndroidMetroid has been treating the woman he’s been assigned to train like she’s a piece of shit on his shoe. Absolutely top-notch advice here.

PressNein continued, advising the future mentor-of-a-female that

anytime she has a question that’s not relevant to the job (ex. How old are you, are you married, hobbies, etc) shrug your shoulders and don’t say a word. Be completely disinterested, even slightly standoffish. If she persists, With a disgusted look on your face look her right in the eye and say: “That’s not appropriate, and I really don’t appreciate you asking”.

Say it with the same conviction that you would tell a child that you’re disappointed in for something. Really bear down with your tone that it is not okay what she is asking you.

Yes, it’s always good to respond to innocent questions about yourself as if you’re a serial killer terrified that the questioner is going to notice the pile of dead bodies you’ve got hidden behind your desk, with the feet of several victims sticking out on one side.

If she tries to be physical with you in any way like brushing you on the shoulder in conversation … [i]mmediately look at her and state that that is not okay. “DO NOT TOUCH ME”.

Take some inspiration from this guy:

Or perhaps this gal:

Well, maybe be slightly more subtle than that.

Say it loud enough so everyone in the room can hear it. It will embarrass the shit out of her and she will learn not to do that again because women hate to be rejected. Especially in public eye. Be as abrasive as possible without giving her a reason to send you to HR.

Boy, it would sure be terrible if some innocent fellow like our boy AndroidMetroid got sent to HR just because he went out of his way to create a hostile work environment for a women he was supposed to be training.

A commenter called n0x29a offered a different approach. Instead of acting like some weird, rude, vaguely hysterical robot, he suggested that our future mentor go all beta on her.

you have to make her lose interest in you by acting like a total cuck or a simp. Try to make her bored and lost interest very quickly in you.

Read about what attracts women and do the opposite.

Women are attracted to masculine men so act very passive and feminine (if you are ballsy)

I guess that could work, even though it doesn’t involve screaming at the trainee or treating her like she’s literally covered in shit.

Someone called Alexius_von_Meinong had a somewhat more pessimistic take, warning AndroidMetroid that he should be ready to run for the door as if there were a missile headed directly for his office.

Be ready to bolt if necessary. This is the employment equivalent of always having a mobility bag ready. While there are rational steps you can take, there are also situations in which your degrees of freedom will be severely limited. If that happens, assess the situation with a cold eye, and act to save yourself first, before anything else.

Alongside all this totally solid advice that couldn’t possibly backfire, there was one strange comment that struck a discordant note. A fellow with the hippyish moniker HaightnAshbury recommended that AndroidMetroid make an effort

to treat this human like a human, to treat her with respect, to maybe gain a friend, if not just a competent colleague.

Wait, what?

If you are a real person … it’s important that you either give this other real person a chance, or, that you go through the proper channels to have a superior or a colleague get her away from you.

Naturally, the regulars on the MGTOW subreddit downvoted this truly weird suggestion — treat a woman like a human being!? — down below zero to a -3.

Being a Man Going His Own Way means never acknowledging that women are from the same species as you.

H/T — a post in the Blue Pill subreddit

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Kiwiwriter
Kiwiwriter
5 years ago

@Kupo:

So if we assume he’s being sincere about the basic details — currently working in an all-male team, assigned to mentor a new female colleague, works in archival tasks that require close proximity to the mentee — it’s possible that it’s been a while since he’s worked closely with a woman, and perhaps between then and now he’s swallowed the red pill and with that new ideology has not needed to have close professional contact with a woman to date. It’s believable. I was part of a team comprised of mostly women in a male-dominated field before, so it’s plausible. Also I think he’s looking to rant and to get validation for his feelings more than to get help from the group. So it’s not so much he doesn’t know how to navigate working with a woman, but he wants reassurance that he’s right in his aversion to it.

Could be possible.

I recall one troll at a site who posted that he had “a key to an apartment in Harlem? Does anyone want it?”

He was trying to show that his antagonists were fake liberals, who wrote checks to support minorities, but wouldn’t live near them.

I responded that I wanted to know about the apartment, because as a fourth-generation New Yorker who still lives and works there (and in a very black neighborhood), I know that Harlem is on an economic upsurge, so if it had a lot of good amenities and access to transportation, I’d be very interested.

He was not amused.

Another guy, for some reason, talked up a recent documentary that said the sun went around the world. He said he thought it was a great documentary and would urge others to go see it. Would that mean his house would now be surrounded by “antifascists banging pots and pans?”

No, I fired back…but his house would be surrounded by PHYSICS TEACHERS banging pots and pans.

Needless to say, every time he opened his mouth on that site, we asked him to fill the room with his theories on geocentricism.

He was not amused.

My point: some of these guys spout this stuff just to be trolls. Whether this guy is or is not…I’m not sure. It’s not as extreme as some other stuff, but weird enough.

Scildfreja Unnyðnes
Scildfreja Unnyðnes
5 years ago

This is what Poe’s Law is actually talking about. It’s impossible to tell whether this guy is actually a misogynistic asshole or if he’s a troll doing it for the laughs.

Back then there really wasn’t a corollary to Poe’s Law, but these days there ought to be: any satire that is indistinguishable from sincere hate speech no longer qualifies as satire.

Kiwiwriter
Kiwiwriter
5 years ago

@Scildfreja Unnyðnes

I don’t know “Poe’s Law,” but I will look it up.

Nowadays, when people only believe conspiracy theories, reality IS satire.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
5 years ago

@ kiwiwriter

If these misogynists and racists really understood anything in the first place, they wouldn’t come up with such stupid ideas.

Unfortunately I don’t think that’s always true; and I also think it could be dangerous to assume that.

It is easy, and maybe even reassuring, to believe racists are just ignorant and non-thinking; just there to be useful idiots for demagogues; or wrought with irrationality.

But at the very least, even if that were true, someone had to be bright enough to manipulate them. And our own history here maybe demonstrates that. Oswald Mosely was apparently highly regarded as a thinker before his blackshirt days. And Enoch Powell was described as “the best mind in politics, until its made up.”

However I think even the rank and file can be intelligent. I don’t think we should underestimate racists by ascribing them all as cliched England shirt wearing football hooligan mentality. You need to know your enemy, and be willing to speak truth to power; and that can be hardest when you’re the non receptive one yourself.

History tragically shows that even genius can be capable of evil; and I believe it might be unwise to forget that.

Just my own view of course, YMMV quite reasonably.

Kiwiwriter
Kiwiwriter
5 years ago

@Alan Robertshaw:

Unfortunately I don’t think that’s always true; and I also think it could be dangerous to assume that.

It is easy, and maybe even reassuring, to believe racists are just ignorant and non-thinking; just there to be useful idiots for demagogues; or wrought with irrationality.

But at the very least, even if that were true, someone had to be bright enough to manipulate them. And our own history here maybe demonstrates that. Oswald Mosely was apparently highly regarded as a thinker before his blackshirt days. And Enoch Powell was described as “the best mind in politics, until its made up.”

However I think even the rank and file can be intelligent. I don’t think we should underestimate racists by ascribing them all as cliched England shirt wearing football hooligan mentality. You need to know your enemy, and be willing to speak truth to power; and that can be hardest when you’re the non receptive one yourself.

History tragically shows that even genius can be capable of evil; and I believe it might be unwise to forget that.

Some of the members and followers are quite bright. They show that in their ability to wage internet flame wars, for example. It actually takes a great deal of ability and energy, however misguided, to do that all day long, come up with clever retorts, and have access to cherry-picking and self-serving arguments. The less impressive variety of members and followers’ arguments degenerate into ad hominem attacks or some of the situations I described above.

The man who became a geocentricist earlier in his career denounced blacks as being evil because black women he encountered in his supermarket were loud and pushy. He also insisted that black women dancing on music videos were emulating the mating behaviors of African gorillas. He further insisted that blacks had an additional molar, which proved their racial inferiority. When ridiculed for these idiotic ideas, he insisted that his antagonists were “scrawny, unkempt” people living in “cockroach-infested apartments in a crummy college town” and demanded that we provide him with our resumes for the past 10 years along with our criminal records for “a profile I am building on you.” On the other hand, he also insisted that Joe Stalin had kidnapped Germans after WW2 and forced them to mate with apes to create a race of monkey-men to serve in his army.

So, besides the fury and insanity, he had something in his head besides the gerbil on its exercise wheel.

I have also seen neo-Nazi nutters without brains. A common statement from such trolls is “Hitler did nothing wrong.” My answer has been, “So why did he lose the war?”

Some of these guys claim to hate Jews (their real enemy) without knowingly having met one. Or they admit that they’re surprised to discover the Jews in their lives were not like that horrible cartoon in the anti-Semitic web pages.

I have read books and accounts of these folks (and met some) and some racists below the leader level are smart (but misguided) and some are angry (and misguided) and some are ignorant (and really misguided or taken advantage of) or in utter personal misery and acting out those inner torments and/or simply looking for a family and recognition and acceptance that they lack in real life (the saddest of all). Neo-Nazism et al. can provide that. Then the young acolyte finds out that the whole thing is mostly a sham to feed the guy who IS highly intelligent, at the top of the operation: the grifting leader.

The leader is an intelligent guy. He’s well-versed in his material, having written some of it. He’s also usually a complete cynic, highly deceitful and manipulative, obsessed with his addiction of endlessly “organizing” and “re-organizing” his “organization,” with rallies, speeches, demonstrations, marches, appearances, more rallies, and web essays. Often enough, it’s a cash cow: Harold Covington, Jeff Schoep, David Duke (who took his donations and used them to study the laws of probability on Mississippi River casinos, where he was a “whale.” The IRS took a dim view of that. His wife took a dimmer view of his womanizing. The same thing happened to Fritz Kuhn in 1939, so Duke was following in Kuhn’s footsteps almost to the track.

The leader, interestingly, has little respect for his followers, regarding them as sheep. He respects his enemies, for their battle against him, and Satan (oddly) for his power. That’s why leaders (like Frazier Glenn Miller and Tom Wilkinson) rat themselves out at trial.

It’s a complex subject.

Time to go home. I have to think about something more horrific now. That mosque that got blasted in Christchurch is two blocks from where my family lived when we were there. We used to walk our dogs in the park on Friday evenings. 20 years later, my daughter walked through that park on Friday evenings going home from her internship at the Court Theater before her spring university term at University of Canterbury. Christchurch is my adopted home. I always felt safe there, even when I walked through Hagley Park at 3 a.m. to the Cathedral for the ANZAC Day Dawn Service. Horrific mass murder is taking place everywhere. There is no escape. Maybe the junior fascists are winning. All it takes is one man with a penknife to grind, a manifesto to post, and an assault rifle. I can’t deal with it any more. I want to go home, but home isn’t safe.

It’s like the opening of “Watership Down,” where the rabbits feel unsafe on their field, and the author shows there’s a sign on it, saying the land is going to be “developed.”

And at age 56, I’m feeling like Hazel at the end of the book, too.

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
5 years ago

@Kiwiwriter:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe%27s_Law is probably the fullest description, though there’s a page on Wikipedia as well.

While originally specific to creationism arguments, the more general version is stated there as:

Without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.

This is, unfortunately, true. Once people tie in their self-image to conspiracy theories or the like, it is practically a certainty that they will go down the rabbit hole because it is easier on their self-image to disconnect from reality entirely than to admit that they might have been wrong.

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
5 years ago

@Alan Robertshaw:
And, if anything, what is commonly referred to as ‘The Nobel Disease’ shows that intelligent people can often be more prone to conspiracy-theory thinking once they start going down that route. This is in part because they believe they’re smart enough to see through any problems even when they’re not (see also Dunning-Kruger), and also because they can be a lot better at coming up with post hoc justifications for things that don’t actually make sense under their initial assumptions.

kupo
kupo
5 years ago

@kiwiwriter
Thanks for the conversation, it’s an interesting thing to think about. People are weird and do things for all kinds of reasons (I would find it fascinating if it weren’t so dangerous!).

Can I ask, though, that you please refrain from terms like crazy, nutters, etc. or disparaging people’s intelligence? I understand your meaning and that it’s not your intention to be harmful with this language (and I know firsthand how difficult it is to scrub from your vocabulary), but it really is harmful to people with mental illness or different cognitive abilities, because casually using that kind of language as insults basically says its bad to be that way. I hope that makes sense. ?

Dalillama
Dalillama
5 years ago

@Alan Robertshaw

And our own history here maybe demonstrates that. Oswald Mosely was apparently highly regarded as a thinker before his blackshirt days

Highly regarded as a speaker, anyway, which isn’t the same thing at all. It’s very common to conflate the two, and assume that elocution is the same as erudition. Simply because a person expresses themselves euphoniously, and salts their speech or writing with literary or philosophical references and latinate words doesn’t mean they’ve actually put any serious thought or analysis into their position.

Kiwiwriter
Kiwiwriter
5 years ago

@ Jenora Feuer:

Thank you for sharing that about “Poe’s Law.” It certainly seems like a self-fulfilling trap.

@kupo:

I see your point, but I have a regrettable tendency to call ’em as I see ’em. I also get frightened by some of their behaviors — the guy who is pleading guilty today to sending bombs to Democratic politicians is one such example — and it’s a bit of a defense.

That guy, James Fields, who drove into Heather Heyer at that rally. I look at his many internet defenders, and have to ask — are you simply spouting that ghastly rhetoric because you’re expected to by your colleagues? Or told to by your leaders? Or do you really believe that Heather Heyer’s death was accidental or that she deserved to die because she was not built like a Playboy Playmate.

kupo
kupo
5 years ago

I see your point, but I have a regrettable tendency to call ’em as I see ’em. I also get frightened by some of their behaviors — the guy who is pleading guilty today to sending bombs to Democratic politicians is one such example — and it’s a bit of a defense.

Well, again, I know it’s a really difficult thing to do, but it is in the comments policy, so please be aware of that and please be respectful to the people who get the splash damage from it. Thanks.

Kiwiwriter
Kiwiwriter
5 years ago

@ kupo

I have a very difficult time respecting someone who powers a car into reverse and deliberately drives it — twice — into a crowd full of people, and a bigger one with his supporters who say that doing so is a “good” thing because of the woman’s weight and politics.

Similarly, I have a very difficult time feeling sympathy for that man in Massachusetts who charged out into the streets of his town, shooting up Muslims, storming into a house to rape and kill a woman (and incidentally losing his virginity while doing so), in the name of neo-Nazism, then surrendering to cops, accepting a plea deal, and then hanging himself in his cell.

I have immense sympathy for people with mental illness who don’t engage in such behavior and try to cope with those conditions. I apologize for painting all victims of mental illness with a broad and unpleasant brush.

IgnoreSandra
IgnoreSandra
5 years ago

@Kiwiwriter

I have a very difficult time respecting someone who powers a car into reverse and deliberately drives it — twice — into a crowd full of people, and a bigger one with his supporters who say that doing so is a “good” thing because of the woman’s weight and politics.

Wow. It’s almost like you personally see being neuroatypical as a bad thing, and thus feel free to use descriptions of those identities as personal insults.

Refer to the comments policy, you flip-flapping pancake singing hash-slinging washing machine.

Kiwiwriter
Kiwiwriter
5 years ago

@IgnoreSandra

Wow. It’s almost like you personally see being neuroatypical as a bad thing, and thus feel free to use descriptions of those identities as personal insults.

Refer to the comments policy, you flip-flapping pancake singing hash-slinging washing machine.”

What are you accusing me of?

Refer to the comments policy, you flip-flapping pancake singing hash-slinging washing machine.

I don’t even know what this means. But it’s pretty obvious it’s abusive.

I do know one other thing…I want to find the proprietor of this site, so I can have that individual unsubscribe me…..RIGHT NOW!

I’m 56 years old and don’t have the time or energy to stand here and get abuse from anonymous strangers. I’m neither a troll nor a flamer, just a mediocre writer, as I said, who phrases things poorly.

For that, you folks seem to want to carve my guts open. Fair enough. I’ve endured that all my life from people who at least did me the courtesy of not being anonymous when they did it. But I’m done here.

Rhuu - apparently an illiterati
Rhuu - apparently an illiterati
5 years ago

@kiwiwriter – you were asked to respect the comments policy, and not use ‘crazy’ or other similar adjectives to describe the perpetrators of the horrific things we discuss on a day to day basis.

(‘Asshole’, ‘racist’, and ‘misogynist’ aren’t mental diseases, ‘swhy.)

You responded to that by first, claiming that you calls’ em as you sees ’em (so throwing neuroatypicals under the bus), and then by describing some pretty horrific things, and alluding that the perpetrators are also neuroatypical, and you don’t have any sympathy for them?

I thiiink you are also saying that you have sympathy for the neuroatypicals who resist violent impulses?

This is why you got the response you did. All you needed to say was “I didn’t think about the splash damage”, or “while I don’t agree, I will abide by the comments policy”.

Some questions: Why did you feel the need to describe the two situations you did? What did you think it would add to the conversation? How was it going to clarify your point?

If you are done with this site, that’s fine. Maybe think on my questions for the next site you frequent, so you can avoid the reactions you got here.

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
5 years ago

A recent comments link on another page to a supposed new comment on this page by Rhuu doesn’t work. The Rhuu comment isn’t here and no amount of refreshing the page shows it to me.

What is going on? How do I immediately view the comment, assuming it does actually exist? If it does not why am I being lied to and told that it does?

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
5 years ago

OK, now I can read it, but what the hell happened? The appearance of a link in a recent comments sidebar means it had been accepted for publication — it was not being held for moderation. If I can see a link to it I should be able to read it immediately by clicking that very link. How do I ensure that, in the future, I can immediately go to and read any comment that that sidebar links to?

Rhuu - apparently an illiterati
Rhuu - apparently an illiterati
5 years ago

Surplus – We are all having problems with the comments. Sometimes they don’t show up (I will refresh, click on the ‘comments’ link in the actual page, then go back to the main page and click back in to try to ge them to show up.)

We are all frustrated by it, but unfortunately, there is no fix.

I don’t know what’s happening, hopefully David and Disqus can fix it, but we just need to ride it out until it is fixed.

I wish I had a different answer for you, but… That’s the answer. That’s all we got.

Rhuu - apparently an illiterati
Rhuu - apparently an illiterati
5 years ago

This time – had to click the ‘comments’ on this page, and it didn’t give me an edit timer. :C Usually I get my edit timer!

(Sorry for the double post, just wanted to share how the site behaves for me. Firefox, windows 7, adblock+ and ghostery running.)

(whoops I should trust this site!)

– Trusted site and the edit timer showed up!!! woop woop

IgnoreSandra
IgnoreSandra
5 years ago

@Kiwiwriter

What are you accusing me of?

Violating the comments policy re: ableism. Not so much an accusation as a statement that I noticed you did so.

I don’t even know what this means. But it’s pretty obvious it’s abusive.

No one knows what it means, because it’s very intentionally nonsense. Think Yosemite Sam going “That rackin’ frackin’ varmint” or some such.

I’m neither a troll nor a flamer, just a mediocre writer, as I said, who phrases things poorly.

For that, you folks seem to want to carve my guts open.

Earlier, you said you didn’t know what I was “accusing” you of. Now you say you do know. It cannot be both.

None of us want to inflict violence on you, we want you to stop using your speech to inflict on others. That is it. So stop it with the “crazy” talk, or implying that non-neurotypical people are in any way synonymous with violent hateful assholes.

@Surplus

Yes, this is an ongoing issue with this blog. We’re all dealing with it.

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
5 years ago

This is the first time it’s actually linked me to a comment by someone else but not let me read that comment. Which means whatever is wrong with the site is getting worse.

Why has nothing been done? It’s been months!

I hope this incident might be the “red line” that prompts someone to actually fix something. Comments being slow to get posted is one thing — comments that HAVE BEEN posted being inaccessible is something else entirely.

kupo
kupo
5 years ago

Comments being slow to get posted is one thing — comments that HAVE BEEN posted being inaccessible is something else entirely

Literally everyone else has experienced this and complained about it. If anything, the problem is less frequent than it used to be, at least for me. Yes, it’s annoying. No, you’re not unique in experiencing it. No, it’s not new or worse.

Rhuu - apparently an illiterati
Rhuu - apparently an illiterati
5 years ago

@surplus – Remember the thread that David put up a little while ago, where he was asking for help keeping the site open? Maybe there’s been things going on in his private life that would, y’know, make fixing this problem one task too many.

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
5 years ago

@Surplus, Rhuu:
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be some sort of issue with differential caching or something like that. Basically:
– Creating an entire page from scratch is a CPU-intensive operation
– WordPress pages usually consist of a number of ‘widgets’ (The ‘search’, ‘recent posts’, ‘top posts’, ‘recent comments’, ‘random posts’ et al on the side are all widgets that can be added or removed from the page template)
– Every time a page is requested, the widgets get checked to see how up to date they are, and then they get assembled into the page; each widget doesn’t necessarily get updated every time, so some of them may be a few seconds old because how much difference is a few seconds going to make
– Because the main page with all the comments takes the most resources to update, it’s probably rebuilt less often than the ‘recent comments’ widget which doesn’t include a lot of text

End result, if somebody else loaded the page right before somebody submitted a comment, the quickly-updated recent comments widget might have newer data than the full article which is still operating off the previously-cached file.

That said, I’m guessing based on my previous work with web servers and databases but no internal knowledge of WordPress. I agree it’s annoying. It’s presumably a side effect of trying to reduce CPU and disk usage on the server, where the programmer didn’t take into consideration that the widgets shouldn’t be allowed to be more up to date than the main page.

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
5 years ago

And, to add on top of that, since it’s a WordPress thing, there’s probably not much David can do about it aside from complain as well, unless he wants to spend a lot of time learning the WordPress code to figure out how it makes its decisions.

Believe me, this is hardly the only WordPress site I’ve seen such things happen on.