At least for now I have unsubscribed from the "OT" topic on this list.

Forgive me; I need to rant for a minute...

I've turned off OT posts not so much because of the traffic or the topics of
discussion, but because it's almost impossible to *read* half of the OT
posts because the people who write them apparently believe that their time
and convenience is more valuable than the combined time of the 600-800+
people who will later try to figure out what they were trying to say.

Specifically I wish to complain about people who use quoting styles that
make it impossible to figure out who wrote what.  We have had extended
exchanges between two people where one "top posts" and the other "bottom
posts" with no attribution line and no signature line, making the entire
discussion impossible to follow unless you are one of the two people writing
them.

In my opinion, if something is worth saying then it's worth taking the time
to say it well, and not simply push the reply-all button and type the first
thing that comes into your head and then mash the send button without ever
looking at the screen.

If it's not worth your time to construct your message in a way that makes it
immediately clear who said what, then I can guarantee you that what you have
to say isn't worth my time to try to figure it out for you.

It also says to me that you don't care about your personal appearance (at
least in a virtual sense) and since this medium is perhaps the only one in
which many of us will ever "meet", the way you write is the way you will be
judged as a person.  Maybe we cannot all be poets, but anyone ought to be
able to learn that you do not fill out an employment application using a
crayon and that there are minimal standards for constructing a posting for a
newsgroup or mailing list.  This is not private email people.

Speaking of employment applications, the net's memory is long and Google
never forgets, so the things that you say here and the way that you say them
are likely to follow you around for the rest of your life.

Thank you, I feel much better now.

G.

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