[TAG] Undeliverable Mail

[Rick Moen]

[I'm snipping "claudesutton at suttonmachine.com" from the CC list, since
obviously it's not deliverable.]

I wrote:

> Not a problem.  Nobody's annoyed at you, Claude.  We just sometimes 
> frown a bit when it seems as if communication is a bit unclear.

OK, so I lied:  _Ben's_ a little pissed off at you, but I hope he'll get
over it, and it's mostly because of the way you jumped to conclusions,
(seemingly) ignored some recent analysis, and gave the impression to Ben
(I think) of thumbing your nose at us in your sign-off paragraph.

We at TAG have a recurring problem:  As Ben says, many of us are veteran 
Unix programmers and sysadmins, pretty well compensated in our $WORK
lives -- but encounter people who blow off our recommendations in a
volunteer context because the advice wasn't expensive enough.  (The
"recurring problem" is thus that of people considering worthless any
assistance that they acquire for free.)

There's no ready cure for that:  It's a fundamental clash between the
open source community's assumption that things should be initially
valued at their (estimated) "use value", on the one hand, and
surrounding society's conflicting assumption that things should be
initially valued at acquisition cost.

However, being aware of the syndrome, we tend to watch for signs of it
occurring, and immediately jumping to "Well, good luck, buddy.  Don't 
let the door hit your ass on the way out" when it seems to be happening.
If we seem to have a chip on our collective shoulder about that, it's 
because that shoulder's been bruised, a bit.

It's a rare day when Ben's the one who's being a little snarky to
someone, while I'm being patient and carefully pleasant.  But (being a
Yank), I always enjoy a chance to try to out-polite a Canadian, figuring 
it might help my country's rather abysmal international reputation, a
bit.  I hope you don't mind.  ;->

-- 
Cheers,                 "Heedless of grammar, they all cried 'It's him!'"
Rick Moen                       -- R.H. Barham, _Misadventure at Margate_
rick at linuxmafia.com