November 13, 2013Nov 13, 201311/13/13I occasionally bring up the issue of people who ask a question and then repeat the question, especially people who repeat the question with some impatience. At the time, the record for the shortest time between the message and its repeat was eight minutes.
July 3, 2012Jul 3, 201207/3/12Today’s rant is a blend of two earlier rants: People didn’t answer your first email for a reason and If you didn’t like the answer, asking the same question again is unlikely to help.
A customer submitted a list of questions (via their customer liaison) to the Widgets discussion list,
February 2, 2012Feb 2, 201202/2/12It’s often the case that when a question from a customer
gets filtered through a customer liaison,
some context gets lost.
(I’m giving the customer the benefit of the doubt here
and assuming that it’s the customer liaison that removed
the context rather than the customer who never provided it.)
Consider the following request:
We would like to know more information about
the method the shell uses to resolve shortcuts.
October 25, 2011Oct 25, 201110/25/11It is a common occurrence that a question is sent to a mailing that is close, but not quite right. Usually somebody will provide information to help redirect the question to a more appropriate mailing list. But this effort does not always go unpunished.
February 24, 2009Feb 24, 200902/24/09A few years ago, there was a question on a mailing list for topic X, but the question was about unrelated topic Y. The question was nevertheless answered by the people on the topic X mailing list out of the kindness of their hearts (above and beyond the heart-sourced kindness that powers most mailing lists in the first place).
January 20, 2009Jan 20, 200901/20/09I find it surprising how often this happens. A customer liaison will send a question to a mailing list like this:
From: X To: Gizmo Discussion
Hi, everybody.
My customer is using the Gizmo Toolkit and wants to frob a gizmo without first registering as a frobber.
December 9, 2008Dec 9, 200812/9/08Some time ago, Ry Jones decided to take something that I wrote and condense it to make it funnier:
Don’t embed pictures. … This isn’t Highlights magazine.
Those ellipses are deceptive, because they hide a change of topic! As a result,
November 14, 2008Nov 14, 200811/14/08It’s not infrequent that I see somebody ask a question that can be answered in only one way. But if that’s not the answer, then nobody will respond.
Is there a module that does XYZ?
This question can be answered in only one way: “Yes,
October 17, 2008Oct 17, 200810/17/08PowerPoint is a fine presentation tool, but some people have elevated it to the level of a cult. The most recent member of the PowerPoint cult was a customer who decided to use PowerPoint in an email message.
No, I don’t mean that the customer attached a bad PowerPoint presentation to the email.
September 9, 2008Sep 9, 200809/9/08Despite my previous rant, absurdly elaborate email signatures are still common at Microsoft, and I’m not just talking about the ones that contain information that may be required by department policy. I’m talking about signatures that use bright colors, large fonts,
