On 7 Apr 2020, at 21:47, mac98aop wrote:
London MUG is just, well, a little more London - events, socials,
membership... and I've never made it along.
What used to happen on LMUG every three days was something like this.
- Someone posts vague question ('eg my printer is not working, can
anyone help?'
- Someone else - let's call them 'helper' - (often me but not always)
'can you let us know what exactly isn't working, and the printer model?'
At this point these two would happily co-operate to find a solution.
Meanwhile the helper would get private emails from *other* list members
('advisors') saying how rude the clarifying question was and how they
should be more friendly when they were being helpful. If you replied
with 'uh, well, we get a lot of these and it's hard to guess, and anyway
the OP is happy, didn't you see the messages?' and they would just go on
and on. What made it worse is that frequently, when you'd managed to get
rid of the first 'advisor', a second one would appear saying it had been
bothering them and they felt they had to say something.. Same. Then
maybe a third. This happened **every time** I helped someone with a
problem, and it wasn't just me, as I asked the list and all the other
helpers said 'yes, please just stop doing this, people - I thought it
was just me'
I swear I'm not exaggerating, it was surreal. One sent me a link to that
Orwell essay about good style (at the time I had just been awarded my
PhD) to help me write better responses to things like 'how do I transfer
things from one computer to another?'.
I tried saying on the list that I wasn't going to deal with this any
more but they kept coming. The day I realised I was still getting them a
month after solving the original problem (and been thanked on the list),
I quit.
You can imagine how grateful I am for SMUG. I tip my hat to you all (and
of course, a longer tip to Sam).
Cheers,
Jason
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