29 Dec 05 Rich Siegel and Me
I belong to a Bare Bones Software mailing list to discuss their Mailsmith e-mail application, an application which I love due to its filtering abilities and its orientation towards the keyboard user.
I was amused by, but chose to kept silent during, the back-and-forth between DrunkenBatman and Rich on haxies — mostly because the parties that I personally like I didn’t feel were in the right. Unsanity’s stuff does marvelous things that as a Mac user I find myself drooling over. I want windowshading, a customizable Apple menu, the ability to theme my system, and so on. But hundreds of Mac Shareware authors are right when they say that it just makes the system too darn unstable, and I know this from my own personal experience. Unsanity’s Rosyna’s a great guy, and was more than willing to step to the plate and try to figure out what was going on between Shapeshifter and Mailsmith, but it just slows my little G3 down way, way, too much. I do think the Mailsmith warning could be rewritten much less offensively, though.
However, despite my belief that he was correct during the haxies debate, I just finished an extremely strange and disturbing exchange with Rich Siegel, however, sufficient enough that I really thought it blogworthy, despite the time-consuming back-and-forth it might ensue. So, I’m consigning it to print. However, this’ll be a long-ass post, since I’m including zillions of excerpts, so let’s continue after the bump.
One of the list’s users (let’s call him Joe) had asked, in an admittedly initially very obnoxious and high-handed way, for some assistance with a filtering problem. Another of the list’s longtime members (let’s call him Bob) began responding to him, but they began to go back and forth. I should underscore that these are excerpts from Joe and Bob’s list posts, although they are, in my judgment, representative excerpts.
Joe: [A]ll I want to is organize my incoming and outgoing mail in the appropriate folders. I didn’t get a clear response to my question from BareBones on the matter. They suggested reading the manual, which isn’t a bad idea, except I have no time for that right now.
Bob: Yet you have time to post messages to the mailing list and read replies written by other users, who probably don’t have any more time than you do, that will more than likely begin by telling you what you didn’t have time to read in the User Manual. I’d guess that in the time it’s taken you to contact Bare Bones support and post to the list, you could have read through the Filters chapter a couple of times and found answers to many of your questions. As with most user talk lists, we don’t mind answering questions and we’re happy to help new users, but it’s generally appreciated if the person asking for help has made a reasonable effort to find the answers on his or her own before posting to the list.
Joe: O dear. I am only now just beginning to slow down. I have been working 12 and 14 hour days, 7 days a week with no days off, non stop, since August doing hurricane relief work. Email is at the present time more of a pleasure than a work need. I am glad I bought MailSmth but yes, it would have been good to get more information from Barebones. And that is why, dear friend, I posted to a list. Lists are generally considered better ways to get questions answered than interrupting busy tech support persons. But then, I did pay for Mailsmith and shouldn’t have to appologize for requesting help, in my opinion. [emphasis added]
Okay, there, in my opinion, it would have been good to have taken a lighter touch. I think someone who has been down in the trenches trying to help with a huge national disaster long after most of us have gone on with our lives deserves a little slack from minute shit like reading the manual before posting a question to the mailing list. Instead, Bob continues:
Bob: But how do you know how much information is available from Bare Bones if you can’t be bothered to take the time to Read The Fine Manual that contains it? I believe that most of your questions are answered fairly succinctly in just a few pages of the Mailsmith User Manual, and I merely pointed out that you might have made more efficient use of your limited time by first using the resources you already have in hand. In fact, I went so far as to point you to the section, by page number, with relevant information. Did you pause to consider that the Bare Bones support person who pointed you to the manual knew this as well, and that perhaps he or she suggested it as the simplest and most direct way to answer your questions?
And later in his message he continues:
I am simply asking that you please do us the courtesy of recognizing that the rest of us may very well be just as pressed for time as you are and that we don’t have any more time to do your homework for you than you do.
The sheer chutzpah in that last message, to me, was just amazing. I honestly don’t know what’s keeping Bob’s life so busy, but that he considers it equivalent to time Joe spends doing relief work … well, that just blows my mind. I mean, I have a lot of stuff keeping my life busy: a job, and a hell of a lot of personal projects. None of them are equivalent in authority to helping relief of a national disaster.
Okay, so, hopefully, you may see what inspired me to comment. But do I unleash my flamethrower? No, not quite. I’ve tried to grow past that — flamethrowers usually don’t do much but start net.forestfires, and are not very useful for convincing someone to come around to your point of view. Instead, I try a gentle noodge.
[Note that the above are excerpts, but from here on out, I present the full text of each message (minus signatures, headers and quotations).]
I shoot a one-liner onto the list:
Did you notice the three words “hurricane relief work” in there?
At this point, Rich Siegel (President, Bare Bones Software, Inc., and he of the perennial X-Mailer: Mailsmith Prerelease (MagicEightBall) — although God willing, I hope that’ll change come MacWorld next month) enters the discussion both as listmom and commenter:
I think we’ve just discovered a new corollary to Godwin’s Law.
Please do not post any more messages in response on this branch of the thread (of course, discussion of the poster’s original question remains welcome, as it is on topic).
Let’s make our first commentary stop there. I must admit, I find his “Godwin’s Law” comment just amazingly offensive.
For those of you who don’t know, Godwin’s Law is most widely understood to be a maxim equivalent to “once a discussion reaches a comparison to Nazis or Hitler, its usefulness is over” (Cuckoo’s Egg author Cliff Stoll to Mike Godwin). (In truth, Godwin’s Law is just a probability statement, saying that it’s likely Nazis will be brought up.)
So, let me get this straight. A Mailsmith user states that he did not thoroughly read the manual because he is exhausted from doing hurricane relief work. Another Mailsmith user continues to tell him to Read the Fucking Fine Manual. I step in and try to gently suggest that the guy give him a little slack, given what is occupying the man’s time.
Either the author’s original mention of his hurricane relief work … or my stated belief that this might earn him a little slack … is somehow equivalent to Godwin’s Law?!?!?! A maxim which was started in order to combat “a trivialization [...] both illogical [...] and offensive (the millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope)”? (Quotes from Meme, Countermeme, an 1994 Wired article by Mike Godwin about Godwin’s Law.)
Wow.
[pause]
Had a moment to assimilate that, there? That hopefully sets the scene a bit …
Shortly thereafter, I receive a message from Siegel in my inbox, responding to my one-liner:
I was trying to figure out how this was in any way appropriate for posting to the list, and then I realized… it isn’t!
In my role as assistant listmom, I say this: if you object to the way someone is conducting themselves on the list, you may take it up with them off list, or you may complain to the listmom at the admin address. Otherwise, please confine your list postings on this topic to questions that have previously been raised in the thread.
The last paragraph is what got my goat a bit. I’ve been on the list a while, and let’s just say, Siegel is not a shy man when he feels a user is not behaving appropriately. If he has a problem with the way someone is conducting themselves on the list, it gets addressed … publicly, not off-list. I usually rankle pretty hard at double standards, so I respond:
With due respect, Rich, you’ve not followed this very prerequisite you’re attempting to lay down on me. There have been many times where you’ve objected to how a user has conducted himself on the mailsmith-talk mailing list and addressed same to him publicly, on the list. Why are you now coming down on me on this particular issue?
Not to mention that I didn’t exactly blast the hell out of him, either. A one-sentence “you did happen to notice … ?” is certainly one of the most mildest forms of criticism one can make.
Siegel’s response is one I’ve seen in quite a few venues, unfortunately, because it’s a handy one to reach for — “because I’m your father listmom, that’s why”:
Because as list mom, it’s my prerogative to do so and determine the manner in which I do.
In an attempt to get him to hash out exactly how evenly or unevenly he’s going to use this tactic, I write:
Are you a list moderator, or an assistant list moderator? You refer to yourself as the latter in our previous message, as the former now. For clarification’s sake.
And, just to clarify: on what basis do you exercise your prerogative? I dislike butting heads with anyone, but the line you just said above is a rather dangerously worded statement. Basically, you are saying that you will squelch a list user’s ability to respond whenever you feel it is appropriate to do so — and I would be curious as to what internal guidelines you use to determine said appropriateness.
In other words, is it a judgment based on predetermined boundaries, which you have enumerated somewhere (such as in list guidelines or a list welcome message)? Or is it a matter of taste or of feeling?
I find this discussion we’re having this morning extremely alarming. [Bob] is using a great deal of over-the-top, flamebait language to attack someone who, admittedly, is being a little high-handed and snotty, but I think has a valid excuse for doing so: he’s been in a very high-stress situation for most of the year. [Bob] is using the sledgehammer when the dove is called for.
I VERY MILDLY point to him something that he might have skimmed over in his responses to the guy, in an effort to calm the argument down. And of that entire discussion, you’re calling ME out on that one sentence?
I *will* take my lumps and agree to being wrong when I’m wrong, cf. the whole haxies matter, but really, I do not feel that it is appropriate to call me out for this.
The e-mails thereafter are short and swift. Rich writes:
I’m sorry you feel that way.
I already see where he’s going, but in an effort to forestall it:
I’d appreciate a response to the other sections of my e-mail, please, Rich, which were far more substantively responding to your message. Thanks.
And, sure enough, he hits me up with:
Let me be more direct: you are entirely welcome to your opinion, but this is not a matter that I have any interest in expending any further time or calories on at the moment.
To which I conclude:
I find that fascinating, and, sadly, not altogether unexpected.
Sadly enough, I was indeed expecting such a response, just as I wasn’t incredibly surprised to see the initial “my list, my rules” response. I’ve been in net.arguments since the BBS days, and usually, if someone who’s in a power position isn’t in a position to rationalize their arguments, both of those standard responses get introduced into the discussion.
Sadly, I’m left with the last line of my e-mail:
Well, we’ll have to see what you do the next time you disagree with something I say on the list.
To which Rich responded:
Fair enough.
Will I continue to be a Mailsmith user? Quite possibly. I’ll at least stick with the copy I already purchased. Would you, after all, stop appreciating the Sistine Chapel if you got into a big fight with Michelangelo? And there really are no decent keyboard-centric Mac OS X mail programs out there, unless you want to go back to PINE.
I must admit, though, when Mailsmith 3.0 is rolled out to the public in 2008, there will be a moment’s pause as I try to decide whether I wish to continue being a customer of Bare Bones Software.
And, here and there, I imagine Siegel’s continued prickliness will have its attritional effect on Bare Bones Software’s customer base. The ones, however, who are friendly, approachable, and continually show respect for their customers become so wildly popular that their dreams are rewarded.
Update 12/29 4:26p: Joe has been helped rather thoroughly by Rich and Bob, saying that he may need to rethink how he was originally approaching this, but feels he will be justly rewarded in the end. This provides a counterargument to what I’ve written above. That having been said, I think many of the points made in this post are still valid.
