NO CARRIER

I often find myself wondering, why do we rely so heavily on e-mail, and at the same time, pay so little attention to what's placed in our inboxes?

Today, I sent an e-mail to my favorite techie mailing list, in the hopes that some peer of mine had run into a similar situation. My first four responses were to whatever section of my e-mail the resonder cared to read, and completely out of context. At least one of them read the rest of the e-mail, realized his reply was silly, and apologized. The last person to respond was the breaking point, and classifies my gripe to a T.

There it was, a perfectly normal mailing list e-mail sitting in his inbox. He scanned it, decided something offended him (I mentioned ignoring FCC regulations, and he very obviously added "(and former broadcast tv engineer)" to the end of his sig), and decided to "set me straight".

He starts his response by telling me that what I'm attempting will get me fined thousands of dollars and could get me years of jail time. He then proceeds to tell me that my idea is poor, because it won't last (this is an idea for a temporary solution that won't be needed in a few years anyway). He follows that up with asking what I'm trying to do (funny, it sounded like he had a pretty good idea when he was telling me how bad mine was), and that if I give him more info he might be able to help me. Ha!

The entire purpose of the list is to bring peers with different experiences together to share, and this moron condescends to me as though I'm a student in his classroom.

Of course, I'm being mildly hypocritical here, because I then proceeded to use the list to fire back at him, under the heading of thanking those who replied. But I still feel partially justified: I bothered to read his ENTIRE response before posting my own, and I tried to maintain a tone of self-defense as opposed to outright condescension.