[lug] courtesy, sarcasm, and Free Software

Nate Duehr nate at natetech.com
Fri Nov 27 12:14:52 MST 2009


Davide, 

Don't worry about it.  Once you find out someone you need to talk with prefers a particular posting type, adjust for them if you want to.  

You find out real quick who you really need to talk to and who you don't. :-)

Or as a favorite band of mine puts it, 

You were the one, who taught me what I don't need.
And I thank you, I thank you for that.
You were the one, who brought me to my senses, 
And I thank you, now just leave me alone. 

Heck, it's 2009... if someone REALLY dislikes the way you type up your e-mails, you can always just send them video screen-cap movies with a nice voice-over explaining the problem... :-) :-) :-)  By the way, *is* there any GOOD video screen-cap software for Linux desktops?  I haven't seen any, but then again, when I'm doing Unix support, a copy of screen and a shared session goes a long way these days.  Or a web conference via the person's desktop which to this day, USUALLY isn't Linux in the corporate world... they fire up PuTTY or whatever, and we plunk away from there.  Whatever works...

Not saying mailing lists have lost their relevance and usefulness, but they're based on 70's and 80's technology, after all.  They're going to have this top-posting/bottom-posting limitation probably until the day I die.

I just silently adjust to any ranters, if I really need to communicate something with them.  Otherwise, I have a lot better things to worry about.  Like whether or not to take advantage of Black Friday deals to add a second monitor to a machine I don't use often-enough.  LOL... THAT's a tough one.  But then again, I'm frugal, so the 17" LCD on that machine will probably be just fine for yet another year.  

Perspective.  Tom's on the computer a ton for his living, and has some preferences.  He's smart enough that he's allowed to have them, because people look to him for assistance.  If there were another "Tom" with identical skill, who didn't care about how the e-mails arrived, guess who'd get more business and be perceived as being "better at customer service" so to speak (even though in this forum, Tom's offering help for free, so he gets to dictate his "rules")...? 

I can honestly say that in my professional job, once a customer's question goes much beyond the basics, we typically fire up a web conference and desktop sharing and get to work on the problem via that method anymore.  Plunking through code in a mailing list just takes far too long.  It's a "you get what you pay for" type of situation... and comes with all the good/bad of the technology used to communicate within it.

Video and webconferences (and shared screen sessions) are where it's at in the paid support world these days... e-mail is for opening the trouble ticket and initial "Hey have you guys ever seen this before?" or... "Hey, could you guys put in a request for a new feature for me?"  

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com

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