Exstatica

In recent communications with a consultant doing some work for us, I find myself more and more frustrated every day.

First some base rules.

1. If you have my IM, it means its ok to talk to me. You do not need to preface every start of the conversation with Drew? I know my name, yes, you can call me that.

2. Get to the point, putting a whole back story to it, when all you really have is a single question then just ask that single question, if I don’t understand your question then I’ll ask you the right questions.

3. short sentences = BAD. Do not send me one word at a time. If you have something to say, spend a little time writing in a longer message. I’m not going anywhere, and if I am, my conversation is stored somewhere, I’ll be able to go back and read it. Its not lost forever.

4. If I’m away or you know I’m mobile do not blow up my IM. If I don’t respond its because either I don’t like you, or I’m busy. Either way give me some time to respond to you.

5. If its going to be a really long IM, and you don’t have a question, or you need to explain something in detail. I have email. I know I know its crazy, I mean who has email, its just so expensive and challenging to use. I’ve overcome that feat, I took 8 years of email understanding classes, but I have it down.

6. Do not use IM to send me pictures or songs, or any sort of file transfering. I don’t want your crap in a folder that I’ll probably forget about in 10 minutes anyway. There are services, its called Image hosting. Infact let me google that for you. Or if you are so compelled use mine. img.exstatica.net

7. Pasting huge amounts of text. I’m going to just block you. Stop pasting me huge conversations of crap, I don’t care, use email, hey I even have a paste area.

8. If you know its the middle of the night for me, try to see if I’m around before you start to just spam my IM client with crap. I use my phone alot, I don’t need to wake up to random conversations.

Overall please don’t abuse peoples IM and get right to the point. Thats the biggest gripe. Giving me all this info that I don’t need just to ask me a question that has nothing to do with the previous messages pisses me off.

FYI most of these rules don’t apply to general conversations. If you’re one of my friends, and you want to just chat, its a little different. I have this thing that I really pride myself in. Its called Common sense. I know its rare, and you may not even know what it is.

Common Sense – Washing your hands on a certain basis to avoid illness.

No Common Sense – Walking across the street in the face of oncoming traffic during a green light.