CPian's Mailing Priority
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I'm quite sure every CP author knows that problem: Sometimes/Mostly/Regularly you get more mail from readers than you can answer (unless you want to spent all your spare time in front of the screen with a mailer, an IDE and an online translator). In the beginning, I tried to answer every mail, even when I needed a dictionary to read it. As time went on, my interest in the old articles died, but the amount of mails per week grew. I began to forget some mails, and found myself moving complicated mails to the back of the queue. Looking at the older pages of my mailbox, I have to admit that a certain system of priorities has appeared in my answering behaviour: - Mails in my language (German) get answered immediately or during the next weekend. - Very simple mails in easy to understand English get answered nearly as fast as the german mails. - English mails with difficult questions (or question I cannot answer) can lay around for more than two weeks. - English mails which I don't fully understand may die in my mailbox, because I'm too lazy to ask for simplier wording. Now, please tell me: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole, or do you also treat yor daily mail like that? :sigh: _________________________________ Please inform me about my English mistakes, as I'm still trying to learn your language!
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I'm quite sure every CP author knows that problem: Sometimes/Mostly/Regularly you get more mail from readers than you can answer (unless you want to spent all your spare time in front of the screen with a mailer, an IDE and an online translator). In the beginning, I tried to answer every mail, even when I needed a dictionary to read it. As time went on, my interest in the old articles died, but the amount of mails per week grew. I began to forget some mails, and found myself moving complicated mails to the back of the queue. Looking at the older pages of my mailbox, I have to admit that a certain system of priorities has appeared in my answering behaviour: - Mails in my language (German) get answered immediately or during the next weekend. - Very simple mails in easy to understand English get answered nearly as fast as the german mails. - English mails with difficult questions (or question I cannot answer) can lay around for more than two weeks. - English mails which I don't fully understand may die in my mailbox, because I'm too lazy to ask for simplier wording. Now, please tell me: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole, or do you also treat yor daily mail like that? :sigh: _________________________________ Please inform me about my English mistakes, as I'm still trying to learn your language!
Corinna John wrote: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole, IMO, not at all. You are being practical. Also IMO, when I write an article, it's "as is, with no warranties implied, etc., blahblahblah". It's up to you has to how you want to respond. Maybe that's too brutal. But I tend to have the attitude "don't look a gift horse in mouth." And yet, I find myself doing exactly that (looking into the mouth, as it were) when reading other people's articles. So, I will conclude with the same emoticon: :sigh: (PS--thanks for the post. Not to sound like an emotional sap on the therapists couch, but I realized something about how I look at other people's articles, that I don't think is right.) Marc My website
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I'm quite sure every CP author knows that problem: Sometimes/Mostly/Regularly you get more mail from readers than you can answer (unless you want to spent all your spare time in front of the screen with a mailer, an IDE and an online translator). In the beginning, I tried to answer every mail, even when I needed a dictionary to read it. As time went on, my interest in the old articles died, but the amount of mails per week grew. I began to forget some mails, and found myself moving complicated mails to the back of the queue. Looking at the older pages of my mailbox, I have to admit that a certain system of priorities has appeared in my answering behaviour: - Mails in my language (German) get answered immediately or during the next weekend. - Very simple mails in easy to understand English get answered nearly as fast as the german mails. - English mails with difficult questions (or question I cannot answer) can lay around for more than two weeks. - English mails which I don't fully understand may die in my mailbox, because I'm too lazy to ask for simplier wording. Now, please tell me: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole, or do you also treat yor daily mail like that? :sigh: _________________________________ Please inform me about my English mistakes, as I'm still trying to learn your language!
Corinna John wrote: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole No. Not at all.
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I'm quite sure every CP author knows that problem: Sometimes/Mostly/Regularly you get more mail from readers than you can answer (unless you want to spent all your spare time in front of the screen with a mailer, an IDE and an online translator). In the beginning, I tried to answer every mail, even when I needed a dictionary to read it. As time went on, my interest in the old articles died, but the amount of mails per week grew. I began to forget some mails, and found myself moving complicated mails to the back of the queue. Looking at the older pages of my mailbox, I have to admit that a certain system of priorities has appeared in my answering behaviour: - Mails in my language (German) get answered immediately or during the next weekend. - Very simple mails in easy to understand English get answered nearly as fast as the german mails. - English mails with difficult questions (or question I cannot answer) can lay around for more than two weeks. - English mails which I don't fully understand may die in my mailbox, because I'm too lazy to ask for simplier wording. Now, please tell me: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole, or do you also treat yor daily mail like that? :sigh: _________________________________ Please inform me about my English mistakes, as I'm still trying to learn your language!
Corinna John wrote: Now, please tell me: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole Yes, of course. You can write a simple standard email reply in which you thank for the received mail and explain that you cannot answer the question due to time constraints. It costs you two mouse clicks. People will understand and accept that reply. Not anwering a (civilized) email really makes you an arrogant ...
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I'm quite sure every CP author knows that problem: Sometimes/Mostly/Regularly you get more mail from readers than you can answer (unless you want to spent all your spare time in front of the screen with a mailer, an IDE and an online translator). In the beginning, I tried to answer every mail, even when I needed a dictionary to read it. As time went on, my interest in the old articles died, but the amount of mails per week grew. I began to forget some mails, and found myself moving complicated mails to the back of the queue. Looking at the older pages of my mailbox, I have to admit that a certain system of priorities has appeared in my answering behaviour: - Mails in my language (German) get answered immediately or during the next weekend. - Very simple mails in easy to understand English get answered nearly as fast as the german mails. - English mails with difficult questions (or question I cannot answer) can lay around for more than two weeks. - English mails which I don't fully understand may die in my mailbox, because I'm too lazy to ask for simplier wording. Now, please tell me: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole, or do you also treat yor daily mail like that? :sigh: _________________________________ Please inform me about my English mistakes, as I'm still trying to learn your language!
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Corinna John wrote: Now, please tell me: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole Yes, of course. You can write a simple standard email reply in which you thank for the received mail and explain that you cannot answer the question due to time constraints. It costs you two mouse clicks. People will understand and accept that reply. Not anwering a (civilized) email really makes you an arrogant ...
CP Visitor wrote: People will understand and accept that reply. Yeah right. Some (quite a lot!) people are complete loonies. Now, I don't have any insights in what Corinna gets in her mailbox, but from my past experience, many of the unintelligable messages, often carry the message "please do my job!". -- An eye for an eye will only make the world blind.
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I'm quite sure every CP author knows that problem: Sometimes/Mostly/Regularly you get more mail from readers than you can answer (unless you want to spent all your spare time in front of the screen with a mailer, an IDE and an online translator). In the beginning, I tried to answer every mail, even when I needed a dictionary to read it. As time went on, my interest in the old articles died, but the amount of mails per week grew. I began to forget some mails, and found myself moving complicated mails to the back of the queue. Looking at the older pages of my mailbox, I have to admit that a certain system of priorities has appeared in my answering behaviour: - Mails in my language (German) get answered immediately or during the next weekend. - Very simple mails in easy to understand English get answered nearly as fast as the german mails. - English mails with difficult questions (or question I cannot answer) can lay around for more than two weeks. - English mails which I don't fully understand may die in my mailbox, because I'm too lazy to ask for simplier wording. Now, please tell me: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole, or do you also treat yor daily mail like that? :sigh: _________________________________ Please inform me about my English mistakes, as I'm still trying to learn your language!
Corinna John wrote: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole, haha :D Evil - because you don't help to EVERYBODY who asks for help (and often don't even need help, they are just evil, arrogant, lazy a**holes) ?? You kiddin', right? Arrogant - Please change "Please inform me about my English mistakes, as I'm still trying to learn your language!" to "If you think my English have mistakes, f**k off I won't waste my time trying to learn your language!" to be arrogant. Lazy - what's wrong with that? :-O Talented == lazy. :) Every day some CPans say "I am too lazy to do ***". If we wasn't lazy, we wouldn't force computers do our work for us! Corinna John wrote: do you also treat yor daily mail like that? I get only few emails.... maybe people don't like me. :~ :D David
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I'm quite sure every CP author knows that problem: Sometimes/Mostly/Regularly you get more mail from readers than you can answer (unless you want to spent all your spare time in front of the screen with a mailer, an IDE and an online translator). In the beginning, I tried to answer every mail, even when I needed a dictionary to read it. As time went on, my interest in the old articles died, but the amount of mails per week grew. I began to forget some mails, and found myself moving complicated mails to the back of the queue. Looking at the older pages of my mailbox, I have to admit that a certain system of priorities has appeared in my answering behaviour: - Mails in my language (German) get answered immediately or during the next weekend. - Very simple mails in easy to understand English get answered nearly as fast as the german mails. - English mails with difficult questions (or question I cannot answer) can lay around for more than two weeks. - English mails which I don't fully understand may die in my mailbox, because I'm too lazy to ask for simplier wording. Now, please tell me: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole, or do you also treat yor daily mail like that? :sigh: _________________________________ Please inform me about my English mistakes, as I'm still trying to learn your language!
I always politely but firmly decline to answer any questions if they are not posted in the article forum itself. I'm a professional working programmer, being my own employer I don't take kindly to me wasting valuable working time answering questions privately one on one that in the end only helps one person. That's completely against the spirit of this whole site. I think it's a mistake to ever answer an email directly about an article when the answer is much better published for everyone to see. I would suggest you encourage people to post their question on the article itself, often someone else will answer it before you even get a chance to. I wish there were a way for this site to encourage more discussion on the article forum and discourage discussion privately unless absolutely necessary for some reason outside the article itself.
"A preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one."
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I always politely but firmly decline to answer any questions if they are not posted in the article forum itself. I'm a professional working programmer, being my own employer I don't take kindly to me wasting valuable working time answering questions privately one on one that in the end only helps one person. That's completely against the spirit of this whole site. I think it's a mistake to ever answer an email directly about an article when the answer is much better published for everyone to see. I would suggest you encourage people to post their question on the article itself, often someone else will answer it before you even get a chance to. I wish there were a way for this site to encourage more discussion on the article forum and discourage discussion privately unless absolutely necessary for some reason outside the article itself.
"A preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one."
John Cardinal wrote: I always politely but firmly decline to answer any questions if they are not posted in the article forum itself. I've learned the hard way to get very suspicious when I hear words like "always" or "never". I have been a user of ToDoList for a long time, and during the long evolution of this great application (thanks again, dan.g :rose: ) I had to post comments about bugs a few times. Some of those issues required sending configuration files or screen shots to the author, facility not provided by CP. While the initial discussion and at least the final resolution were always posted in the forum, there were times when the messages sent along the way where not relevant to anybody else. OGR
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I'm quite sure every CP author knows that problem: Sometimes/Mostly/Regularly you get more mail from readers than you can answer (unless you want to spent all your spare time in front of the screen with a mailer, an IDE and an online translator). In the beginning, I tried to answer every mail, even when I needed a dictionary to read it. As time went on, my interest in the old articles died, but the amount of mails per week grew. I began to forget some mails, and found myself moving complicated mails to the back of the queue. Looking at the older pages of my mailbox, I have to admit that a certain system of priorities has appeared in my answering behaviour: - Mails in my language (German) get answered immediately or during the next weekend. - Very simple mails in easy to understand English get answered nearly as fast as the german mails. - English mails with difficult questions (or question I cannot answer) can lay around for more than two weeks. - English mails which I don't fully understand may die in my mailbox, because I'm too lazy to ask for simplier wording. Now, please tell me: Am I an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole, or do you also treat yor daily mail like that? :sigh: _________________________________ Please inform me about my English mistakes, as I'm still trying to learn your language!
It's not being "an evil, arrogant, lazy a**hole", but it's not great either. It is a very good habit to reply to any message no later than the next day. It doesn't have to be a complete solution, you just need a couple of templates: - "Sorry, I cannot spend time with this nonsense" (You might want to find a better way to put this) - "I don't understand, please reformulate" - "I cannot reply right now, please resend the message if I fail to get back to you in the next X days" Something like this builds good business habits, makes everybody happier and gives your karma a huge boost :-) OGR
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John Cardinal wrote: I always politely but firmly decline to answer any questions if they are not posted in the article forum itself. I've learned the hard way to get very suspicious when I hear words like "always" or "never". I have been a user of ToDoList for a long time, and during the long evolution of this great application (thanks again, dan.g :rose: ) I had to post comments about bugs a few times. Some of those issues required sending configuration files or screen shots to the author, facility not provided by CP. While the initial discussion and at least the final resolution were always posted in the forum, there were times when the messages sent along the way where not relevant to anybody else. OGR