So awhile back I made a post called “Ambien Forces Married Couple to Sleep in Same Bed”

The post is intended to be humorous. It’s simultaneously poking fun at this country’s pharmaceutical craze as well as the growing tendency of married couples to sleep in separate beds (even separate rooms.)

As the post aged and was absorbed into the Googlebot I started to notice incoming links from sites and forum threads where the posters were discussing Ambien. I followed the links back to read some of these threads and found that some people actually used my made-up statistics to support their arguments! They obviously didn’t read my entire post.

I admit that in the past I’ve been in internet-arguments and gone digging for snippets of facts to support an argument. The lust to claim “pwnership” over a topic is great and often results in too-quick clicking of the mouse. On rare occasions (never for this blog…yet) I’ve found myself using quotes or figures that were totally fictional (maybe that “pwnership lust” is why some articles on wikipedia are so screwed up!)

I’m more careful these days. I always make sure that the facts I use are real as opposed to completely fake. (but hilarious!)