Maughan Hub: King’s Confess London – When A Meme Page Goes Too Far

Maughan Hub is a series of articles written by KCL’s Comedy Society members, published on Wednesdays. We hope they entertain you wherever you are!

To protect the student’s privacy, all names have been changed. ‘David Adamson’ agreed to the publication of this piece.

In 2018, I joined KCL as a first year, and carried with me that keen Fresher’s instinct for research and drive for change. I, however, was seeking to alter the most accessible vehicle for student culture — KCL student Facebook pages. 

Most universities have a rich array of pages to choose from: the alpha confession pages, the beta crush pages, and, depending on how invested the student body is, designated meme groups spanning all the way down the Greek alphabet. Unfortunately, we only have Kiss College London, so I decided to be the change I wanted to see in the world. I started a KCL confession page. That October, King’s Confess London was born.  

Unbeknownst to me, though, KissCL had already monopolised confessions and memes alongside its crush posts. Despite our mediocre efforts, King’s Confess London tanked. The submissions stopped trickling in, I made friends and got some semblance of a life, and the page lay derelict. 

The following summer, I logged back onto the page. Amongst a whopping two submissions, one of which was just a picture of a dead rat, I noticed something else. Instead of following the anonymising submission link, someone had messaged the page directly. A man called Abdul Khadrina. No profile picture. Just an entirely unfamiliar name attached to an eerie, faceless profile. His text read: 

“David Adamson, is my grandson, and I have not seen him for 3years!!!!!!!!!!!”

This was alarming for a whole host of reasons. The fact that this man was using a student Facebook page to track down his grandson was certainly one of them. David and I had mutual friends, but the page was not linked to me in any way — meaning that Abdul had literally just searched for any page somewhat related to King’s College London and exclaimed into the void. Additionally, the punctuation makes it pulse with unnerving energy. The sheer amount of exclamation marks literally sped up my heart rate, and his use of commas made it read like he was expelling these words with vengeful, wheezing breaths. David Adamson *gasp* is my grandson *gasp* aND I HAVE NOT SEEN HI— 

I sent a screenshot to David immediately, who confirmed that Abdul was, in fact, his estranged grandfather. With him not being the nicest of men, his family didn’t make a habit of staying in touch, so Abdul tried to track him down on social media every so often. Though David was anxious about me replying to the message for fear of how many more exclamation marks Abdul may dish out, he applauded his apparent technological competence (though he messaged the page instead of using the submission link, but that CrushNinja form confuses the best of us) and appreciated the memes I made to commemorate the situation.