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Larry [in .announce]:
> {...initial post...}
Me [in .market.auction & .admin.general]:
> I just about spewed coffee all over my keyboard when I saw an auction
> announcement in the .announce group, and from Larry of all people. This
> appears to really be pushing it, I think.
Larry [in .market.auction & .admin.general]:
> I didn't see it as "pushing it", but in hindsight, I should have checked
> with you first but I have been dragging my feet on this a bit. Felt that
> I needed to get moving at last.
Me [in .admin.general]:
> That's why I wrote, "This appears to really be pushing it" rather than,
> "This is pushing it." Meaning, at first glance, it appears to be pushing
> it.
Larry [in .admin.general]:
> Ah, OK, thanks... Been a consultant too long. When I say to a client:
> "It appears that your business rules may be contributing to significant
> process delay, which may have a cost or schedule impact." what I really
> mean is "Your people are getting in the way of getting our work done.
> Please make them stop or we are going to charge you more."
>
> So naturally I tend to filter out "appears" when I read the words of
> others as pure filler without any real value add to the sentence. :-)
> And then it comes across as "you're not only over the line, it's more
> egregious than most."
I owe Larry a visible apology in .market.auction for posting what I posted
without thinking more carefully about the wording.
I often forget that I'm a literalist when I write things, especially when
writing to someone who is as educated as Larry is. I didn't think about the
underlying meanings that phrases like "appears to be pushing it" and "from
Larry of all people" might imply, taken by themselves.
Larry called me on it, which was good.
I didn't mean to suggest that Larry was pushing it in a bad way, but rather
that it was likely to appear to the uninitiated that Larry might be pushing
it in a bad way. That was the segue into the seemingly contractictory
paragraph...
Me [in .market.auction & .admin.general]:
> But: More than this is an auction, it is fundamentally a fund raiser. You
> have donors of objects to sell and a recipient of the proceeds. The fund-
> raiser just happens to be carried out via auction instead of straight sale.
...which was intended to illustrate why the appearance of Larry's pushing it
was not really pushing it, but rather a creative interpretation of the rules
of the group, and his understanding the difference between the spirit behind
the rules and the "letter of the law."
Someone suggested privately that perhaps a more effective (and polite) course
of action (or policy) would be been to delete an offending post and reprimand
the poster privately before just jumping in and reprimanding them publicly.
I agree with that philosophy in spirit, but there are a couple problems with
carrying it out. First, it's an administrative policy here not to delete
other people's posts based on their content (this borders on, if not is,
censorship), and second, since the article must remain in place as-is until
the original poster decides (if/when) to cancel the post, it becomes
important occasionally to attach follow-up comments in a for-the-record
fashion, so that later readers can see the side-issues. This is a downside
of the NNTP news paradigm, at least an implementation in which old content
is fixed at post-time.
Anyway, the bottom line: I was not intending to reprimand Larry; I think the
only potential cause for concern w.r.t. Larry's original post is in the way
an uninitiated reader might perceive it -- as pushing the limits or as
breaking a rule and getting away with it. My response to Larry's original
post neglected to take into account the way in which it might be perceived.
I approached it from a completely wrong direction -- which was still rooted
in the initial surprise I'd felt.
--Todd
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