Amanda Tatro, Welcome to the Interweb

It was a bad week for Amanda Tatro, 29, a student in mortuary science at the University of Minnesota:

• Her boyfriend broke up with her.
• She posted a few stupid revenge-fantasy status updates about him on Facebook, involving the cutting tools used in her embalming class.
• Her professors banned her from campus because they were afraid she might be serious (who knows, maybe she was).
• The Star Tribune picked up the story and blasted it all over the interweb.

Some of the quotes from Tatro's status: "looking forward to Monday's embalming therapy... Give me room, lots of agression to be taken out with a trocar [a sharp surgical instrument used in embalming]." Then she followed up with this: "I still want to stab a certain someone in the throat with a trocar though. Hmmm...perhaps I will spend the evening updating my 'Death List #5' and making friends with the crematory guy. I do know the code..."

Now every time Tatro applies for a job, potential employers will see that, at a minimum, she lacks judgment, if not mental balance. Potential boyfriends may wonder about her mental state even more. And every other Amanda Tatro (Google tells me there are quite a number of them, to my surprise) will have the same trouble, too.

Finally, I'd like to point out that Tatro is a 29-year-old adult, not a teenager. Supposedly our capacity for judgment is fully developed by her age. And I'm not so much amazed about her loose invective -- which I could imagine happening in a face-to-face conversation between her and a friend -- but on Facebook? Where everyone you know can see it, including relatives, old high school friends, and people you work with?

It's like winning the anti-lottery.