[X-Newbies] Newbie Lessons

[Vincent Cayenne]

At 10:50 AM -0500 5/23/05, Steven Rogers wrote:
>That's what etiquette is all about - it gives you some basic 
>expectations for a common ground. Its how you become aware that the 
>little things you might be doing that seem of no consequence to you 
>might be really inconvenient for someone else.

An excellent and well-stated point. I'll expand this with a personal 
example: I'm no longer a newbie (with respect to email, at least). I 
receive anywhere from 400-900 messages per day. I track more than 100 
mailing lists, attend to several business interests and deal with 
personal mail related to family and personal hobbies. My mail is 
aggressively filtered, flagged, sliced & diced so that I can easily 
choose what is appropriate for me to deal with at any given point in 
my day. There ensues an email version of triage: Is it important? 
Interesting? Simple? Personal? A well-known issue? A current issue? 
Otherwise intriguing? And so on.

But some email makes this much harder. Mail with no subject or a 
vague or inappropriate subject gets short shrift because I simply 
cannot take the time to figure out what it's about. Mail that rambles 
and doesn't ask a direct question yet imparts no useful information 
as to what the writer seeks - that get's ignored. The post that 
regurgitates all of a digest with a reply or query hidden in among 
oodles of quoted material - I won't *find* the info or question. And 
so on.

It's not necessarily or deliberately rude or punitive, but I simply 
won't be bothered to do extra work to dig the stuff out.

On the other hand, newbies always are overly concerned about seeming 
to ask a stupid question. There's far, far less likelihood of getting 
hassled over a question thought stupid than there is of being 
overlooked/ignored because of bad netiquette.
-- 
'tis as said. [Reality is defined by being described]