Today, I had drunk sex with a girl that I barely know. I didn’t have a condom and was nervous about getting her pregnant, but she assured me that I could pull out. Right when I was about to pull out, she wrapped her legs around me and yelled, ‘Be my baby’s daddy!’ I couldn’t get out in time. FML.”
Everyone has bad days: A failed test, an awkward moment with an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend, performing badly at work or being tricked into being someone’s “baby’s daddy” can ruin any 24-hour span. But for countless Internet users around the country – and many students at this university – posting and reading short anecdotes about their daily misadventures such as the one above on the website fmylife.com is one way to complain and commiserate with others who are just as unfortunate.
F— My Life is the growing-in-popularity brainchild of Maxime Valette, a consultant and web developer who launched the website in his native France in January 2008. An English version of the website was created this January and receives about 800,000 hits a day.
“The idea is that s— happens to us all,” Alan Holding, a website moderator and spokesman, wrote in an e-mail. “Sharing the crapness of whatever happened to you during the day can have some therapeutic value, especially when you consider the amount of people who can interact with you, feel your pain or take the piss out of your mishap.”
A group of administrators moderate the site, validating all anecdotes and checking for duplicate posts. Stories must start with “Today” and end in “FML.” Once the moderators approve the anecdote, it is posted to the main page. Visitors can then vote two different ways: “I agree, your life is f—ed,” or “you deserve that one.” These votes determine which stories are top FML or flop FML.
“It’s hilarious,” sophomore finance and accounting major Esther Blinkoff said. “It really makes me feel better about my own life. Some of these stories are so horrible, and the best part is when people say, ‘You deserved it,’ or ‘I agree, your life is f—ed.’ It’s just become something that everybody knows about and talks about.”
Visitors can also become members of F— My Life and can create a profile, save and share anecdotes on other social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and personalize their comments with pictures.
Sophomore African-American studies major Andrew Perrin is a F— My Life reader who not only checks it regularly but also attempted to post his own tale of woe on the website. Before going to class one day, Perrin bid on a Playstation 3 on eBay; when he returned from class, he read an e-mail from eBay saying he had won the item for $250.
“I was excited for a minute,” he said, “but then I saw that I had an e-mail saying that the seller wanted to cancel the transaction because his house was broken into a few days ago. The PS3 he was selling was gone.”
While Perrin’s submission did not make it through the editing process and never ended up on the website, he still reads F— My Life often, he said.
“I think one post is enough,” he said. “It is more fun reading than posting.”
Though nothing has been finalized, Valette and his team are bouncing around ideas for a slew of different features. Last month a survey was posted to gauge readers’ thoughts on new options, such as posting the gender of each story’s subjects. Administrators will act based on the feedback they receive, according to Holding.
“As for the future, we don’t really know, we’re just taking the time to make the most of the ‘here and now,’ and enjoying the thousands of new stories we get every day,” Holding wrote. “It’s pretty amazing to realize that no matter what country you live in, there’s always something in the stories you can relate to. The same s— happens to all of us all over the world!”
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