Today’s nuclear fusion-like surge of conspicuous rubberneck-morality was certainly something to behold. Notwithstanding a person’s basic and immutable right to reciprocal respect, human decency and not being
maliciously threatened, today’s blogosphere response was in most cases emotional rather than rational. Doesn’t make it right tho’. The three guilty-until-proven-innocent protagonists are friends. That means what I’ve read about them today fundamentally conflcts with what I know, and while they may have made the mistake of wandering down a particular back-alley they should have known better to avoid, the kangaroo court tone today doesn’t sit at all well with me, either objectively or subjectively. I would attempt to write some more about the matter but someone else I know and respect has done
a much better job than I could hope to.
Until a couple of years ago I used to bang heads with my previous boss every now and then over email. Take two strong willed people, both pulling in the same direction but not always in total agreement and you tend to get degree of, ahem, creative tension. I think he secretly liked to push my buttons and I am clinically unable to take a telling from anyone - haven’t decided if that’s a character flaw or strength yet. You get the picture. But after one particularly prolonged bout of email-borne snark tennis, I decided to employ a device that would provide me with a short time window to sanity check my responses for over emotionality.
In MS Outlook you can create rules for managing and sorting your emails. Usually most people only think of creating rules for filing incoming emails by subject or sender. However, you can also create rules for outbound emails.
I would heartily recommend this to any Outlook user; create a rule that means every email that you send, first-of-all sits around in your Outbox for two to three minutes before actually leaving. The Outlook default setting is for all your outbound emails to go immediately you hit “Send”. But by creating for yourself this small time window, you are provided with a cool-off period to reflect on the message you’re sending, edit it, fix a typo or just plain delete it and avert a further needless escalation in hostilties; or just pick up the phone instead. I find that looking at an email in its whole form gives you a different, more objective way of looking at it compared with the view you get when you’re actually sitting inside the email drafting process, so to speak.
Someone needs to create a blogging version, for all our sakes. We should have a global adjustment, a blog equivalent of a reverse leap year, a blog-skip-day; where everyone would synchronise a 24 hour time delay on every blogging service and comment handling system. C’mon, who would really notice the initial lost adjusment day? make it a Sunday or something. Thereafter every post and comment would have had a fulll day to be reviewed, self-censored, deleted or tweaked.
I’m a freaking genius.