Hey! You people stop being friendly and enjoying each others company while waiting! It’s annoying! Oh, and stop smiling and having fun! *
As previously written the email notification will change subject after something important happened. When that happens if you don’t want to wade through the chatter just go to the first post in the thread to get the meat. This has been written before so some folks have no excuse for what they recently wrote. Except that they think that they can control people being friendly on a forum known for this sort of banter.
*Story time… I actually had a sometimes “boss” at work who made similar serious statements to what I wrote in jest. She was pure poison. She got the middle finger salute, done behind her back. She didn’t come out of her workspace very often. She was NOT a very nice person and had all the personality of a badger. In another area she would regularly threaten “her” workers jobs and after a time they told her to just “Go ahead!”, to her face. They still have their jobs and she was put into a cage out of our sight (there was some doubt as to her humanity) and shipped off to parts unknown. Maybe back to the hyena enclosure. It was a big place (1500+ workers) and misfits would regularly show up as they do in any cross section of society. They were tolerated for a time then gotten rid of if they didn’t straighten out. Once I had the dubious “pleasure” of having her as a distant supervisor (the same place she threatened the workers). In that time realizing I was the noob I kept my mouth shut and did more than what was required of me. If I was in conflict I did what I could to get along realizing I was the noob that had to fit in, and others weren’t going to change to suit me. I had more overall seniority, but none in that department.
There might be a good reason I wrote all of the above, or maybe I just had time, nothing better to do, and just wanted to take a walk down memory lane.
But seriously, people may have somewhat shorter fuses than usual with all the stuff happening outside BLF lately… it seems like the whole world is on edge. Hundreds of people waiting together in a cramped space like this is going to cause some friction even on a good day, and there have been a lot of not-so-good days lately.
So as a general guideline, any time you are faced with a decision of whether to escalate or not, please take a deep breath and choose not to escalate unfortunate situations. Strong opinions can be very satisfying to express, and they can attract a lot of attention, but they tend to be divisive and cause conflict.
If you must get frustrations out, direct them toward Moloch, the incarnation of the system itself. Because almost no one is evil; the problem is that almost everything is broken. It’s almost never malicious intent which causes our problems but, rather, the systems in which we live. In almost any complex multi-person system, the system acts according to its own chaotic incentives that don’t necessarily correspond with what any individual within the system wants.
Now, in a relatively small system, individual efforts to go against the flow are important. A few people swimming upstream can have a significant impact on the overall flow of the system. However, in larger systems, individual efforts are mostly irrelevant. The flow will follow the shortest path toward the incentives regardless of individual attempts to divert it in other directions. It does what Moloch wants, not what the people trapped in the system want.
As the thread grows, and as BLF grows, we keep bumping into Moloch in new ways… and we keep having to come up with new solutions for that. The lessons learned here will surely help future projects to run a little smoother, but for now please try to be patient and charitable toward each other.
I went back and edited the post using your correction.
As I added:………clearly I had a fixation (or a physical/emotional perturbation) from the playfully erotic, and more attractive Alexandra Wentworth at that time.
It was so bad, I never even noticed young Jennifer Lopez in the cast of dancers on Living Color back then.