Though it is not nice to make fun of people with serious reality-interface problems, that is more or less our founding principle here at Famous and Nonfamous Strangers. Over the years people have shared with me lots of crazy letters, but here’s something I’ve never seen before (detailed at Ars Technica)… a hand-written petition of Federal Court seeking $5 Billion-with-a-B from Google!
To wit, Mr. Jayne has filed suit against Google and its founders for supposed “crimes against humanity,” aiding terrorism, and putting his personal safety at risk. The Pennsylvania man filed the suit on Tuesday with a federal court, and asks for $5 billion in damages. That’s right: five billion dollars.
What’s the problem? The handwritten statement of the claim, seen by Ars Technica (online here), sums up the main charge: “I, Dylan Stephen Jayne, plaintiff, has [sic] a social security number that when the social security number is turned upside down in its entirety it is a scrambled code that does spell the name Google®.”
Apparently he’s upset (something of an understatement) that details of an arrest on public drunkenness and resisting arrest are searchable on the site. And that has led him to a number of other rather more nefarious conclusions. Of course now if you search for “Dylan Jayne,” you get piles of posts poking fun at him. That’s just the way the world works now–the village idiot now has a global (“blogal?”) village to call home. And from the image above, we all have his home address! That’s something these crazy rants, letters and legal filings have in common — the paranoid individual always manages to disclose much more personal information than they should, to the effect that lots of strangers really DO know where they live. Perhaps it’s a kind of wish fulfillment. (Consider it entirely fulfilled here!)
What worries me is not his particularly conspiracy theory, but the danger that this particular brand of mental illness might spread — if we all went nuts over the embarrassing tidbits that search engines index, we’d all be well and truly around the bend. You might hold out hope that God will forgive you, but you must always remember that Google never forgets.