Many would consider me a Luddite, preferring Mutt as my MUA. of choice. I can imagine the cries of people who use so-called modern mail readers: fancy text formatting! embedded images! annoying layouts! hidden viruses! phishing scams!

What happened to the power and effectiveness of the written word? I suppose many aren’t capable of scribing a well-formed sentence, so they compensate with fonts, colors, and cryptic abbreviations. Still others are attracted to the shininess of the formatting. They can send mail that looks like a web page! Even when all they wanted to do was ask a short question!

This is progress?

Normally, I’m content with killfiling any mail that arrives with a content type of text/html. Unfortunately, there are some people I simply must communicate with for whatever reason (usually it involves money in one way or another). One of the fastest ways to get on my bad side is to send me mail that requires extra effort for me to read. This rant is a result of one of these messages.

I drafted a message of moderate length to discuss some points I thought important. Normally, I would expect any responses inline or, at worst, top posted. No, the response I received was even worse than what I see from users of Eudora’s unintelligible reply style. The responses were added directly to the paragraphs I had written, but styled bold and red for “readability.”

Hello, this is my opinion on the matter. I see, but have you considered this other thing?

As can be expected, this style doesn’t lend itself well to reading in plain text. Of course, I don’t think this style lends itself to any kind of comprehension.

I responded to this message, demonstrating how difficult it was for me to read without jumping through hoops, and expressing my annoyance at being forced to jump through said hoops. I tried to be kind, blaming the bad-habit-inducing tools (Outlook) rather than the writer. So this fellow tries again.

With an attached PDF file.

Seriously? Was he so enthralled by the font styling that he felt compelled to force upon me an attached document in order to render correctly? Maybe e-mail really is dead. Apparently a well-written, plain text message is too much to ask for.

[tags]annoyances, e-mail, people[/tags]

Anyway, go take the survey.

http://perlsurvey.org/

Apparently, this the people track is very popular with everyone. This session, People Hacks, is standing room only. Unfortunately, Adam Keys’ slides weren’t able to display on the screen. I think his talk stood on its own. In fact, I wish more talks lacked slides. For most people, they’re a crutch.

People Hacks is about advocacy, moving minds, and organizing teams. It’s a fact of life that no man is an island. We have to work with people, and they won’t always be our friends. Sometimes we want to hit them. Sometimes we talk past them. But we do need to work with them. And we can’t always hit them.

Most of us program because we like logic. We like dealing with machines that are predictable and rational. But we have to deal with people. People who are not always predictable and not always rational.

“There is no man page for humans.”

Truer words were never spoken.

People who are in a good mood are easy to work with. People who are sad or in a down state are difficult to work with (think emo kids—the new blonde jokes!). Get someone to smile. Humor is infectuous. Once people are laughing along with you, they’re easy to bring over to your side. Conversely, negative feelings spread like wildfire. Avoid negativity.

“The ABBA Method.” ABBA is like negativity. A little goes a really long way. When down, go listen to ABBA. How… odd.

Everyone loves a critic (Fox News?), but no one really enjoys criticism. It never goes over well. People take it poorly, they go on the defensive. When people are criticized, they withdraw from the conversation, and no one can move forward. Throw a compliment in. “Kiss their ass before handing it to them.”

Open Source has a love/hate relationship with jerks. We don’t tolerate them at all when they troll forums. However, if they’re a strong personality on an Open Source project, we’ll put up with them. A lot.

Sometimes you’re the jerk. We can all be jerks at times. If you can’t avoid it, at least recognize it and apologize for it.

After a while, the talk turned into a list of patterns of behavior found in people with ways to disarm them. The slides would have helped here, as it’s getting a bit more difficult to follow along.

He highly recommends reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.

And now it’s time for lunch, and I’m hungry, so I’m done.