"PatBateman" (PatBateman)
11/15/2020 at 09:58 • Filed to: STOP READING MY TAGS | 3 | 5 |
In my retail banking days, when real estate bubbles were unheard of and auction rate bonds were considered liquid (look it up), I was trying to get into the weeds with my love affair with cars. Sure, the Countach was always my favorite Italian exotic since it came out, but that’s the gateway drug to the auto enthusiast world. And the guy who introduced me to car heroin was a young teller, trying to figure out his way in his financial career, exactly where I had been five years before.
While we were briefly making pleasantries one morning, he had mentioned how he read some car news on Jalopnik.com, whatever the hell that was. So when I got home that day, I looked it up on my computer. Would you look at all the car nerd articles!! Amazing!!
After a couple of years, after real estate bubbles became a real thing and money managers were sued over telling people that auction rate bonds were liquid, I found a website that was attached to Jalopnik: Oppositelock.jalopnik.com. I was intrigued, and on some random thread, I asked the great moderators to be given author status. A man named Gamecat gave it to me immediately, and told me that it was because my own Kinja user website was named “Pierce & Pierce”. It was that kind of attention to detail, attached to an ironic Kinja username (a good guy in finance using a moniker belonging to a bad guy in finance) who had a TON of reaction gifs made for it, that pushed my chances of getting approved over the edge. Thanks, GC.
Since then, through this admittedly edgy and dumb screenname, I have written a few “articles” that were pushed to the front page by Patrick George and Kat Callahan. 50k clicks on a funny story about the difficulty of opening a McLaren MP4's doors under pressure might not come close to Tales From The Blackbird, but it felt good to get that much attention. There were a couple of others, like the one time I got to ride with a few Italian exotic collectors on a road trip, took too many pics, and one guy threatened to sue me (for nothing, he was just pissed I posted the pics, and he had done the same thing to people that posted them to Twitter randomly, so he’s just an asshole instead of someone that could actually sue me for what I did) so I took the entire story down from my cell phone while standing in EPCOT with my family. That had already gotten 60k clicks in a few hours, but it is forever lost in the nether, just like this post will be.
All the other articles and comments were mostly in jest, and shouldn’t have been taken seriously, because my life is already serious enough IRL, so learn to take a joke, dammit.
This site has been an outlet for my car-related creative side, and I have thoroughly enjoyed pretty much all of the comments and posts I’ve made. Yes, a few of you are sanctimonious assholes that would argue with me if I made a post about the sky being blue (no, shithead, blowing stop signs is not the right thing to do, and there’s no amount of mental gymnastics you can perform to stick that landing IRL), but most of you are wonderful people, and I wish you the best if I don’t see you around the other interweb places.
I’ll be on DriveTribe or whatever the fuck they call it, the hyphen site, and a few other places, monitoring where some people in this community choose to move to. Otherwise, I encourage all of you to keep typing fun things out about cars, and not allow the herb to dictate whether or not you put out content.
I’ll miss you most of all, Kinja. And by “miss”, I mean “my life will be far less stressful without your incessant malfunctions”.
Don’t be a stranger if you see me around. Vaya con dios, friends.
superdave847
> PatBateman
11/15/2020 at 10:12 | 2 |
I’ll be a sanctimonious ass over on hyphen!
f86sabre
> PatBateman
11/15/2020 at 10:35 | 1 |
Later tatter. I’ve enjoyed your posts and contributions to the community. See you on the other side.
RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars
> PatBateman
11/15/2020 at 11:09 | 1 |
It was great reading your articles sir, I hope to see more of them as time goes on around the internet! Please don’t be a stranger to us at The Hyphen or DriveTribe! :)
onlytwowheels
> PatBateman
11/15/2020 at 11:15 | 0 |
Who is the Leader - 404 / Blog No Longer Available
> PatBateman
11/15/2020 at 13:20 | 0 |
So long and thanks for the content
*says I as I make over the hedge with all your content to be put to unscrupulous uses*