phil ringnalda : There is no they

There is no they

One of the things that living in a very small town where a significant part of the population is people who have recently moved away from a big city throws into stark contrast is how differently small town folks and big city people use third-person plural pronouns. If you park on the street in a big city, and there’s a flag on a pole in the sidewalk that’s so big it drapes down onto your car (yeah, I know, y’all don’t actually fly the flag on the sidewalk, but bear with me), you’re likely to say to someone “What the hell were they thinking, getting such big flags? That was stupid of them, and they should fix it.” In a small town, if you don’t already know the story, you’re much more likely to ask “Do you know how we ended up with such big flags?”, since the answer is probably that the Special Olympics boosters bought them to sell for a fundraiser, but the company sent the wrong size, and refused to take them back or give a refund, and the mayor, whose son is a Special Olympics participant and whose cousin heads the boosters, bought them for the city so the whole project wouldn’t go under, and it’s a good thing you asked rather than accusing, since you’re talking to the mayor’s sister-in-law.

The world of weblogs isn’t a big city.

If you throw in a random snark about “How the hell would you write a parser for this?” (oops, what I meant was “How the hell would you write an app to deal with this?”) in a link to a FOAF article, then the next morning when Dan Brickley searches Feedster for “foaf”, there you are, insulting his best efforts. Throw off some random comment about AmphetaDesk, and Morbus appears out of thin air. Say “Blogger sux, everyone’s going to quit using it, and the devs are all going to burn in Hell for all eternity” (as someone does twice a second or so); well, Ev does read a blog or two, even at random. Although I don’t actually know of any Microsoft employees who work on IE and read blogs, the odds aren’t quite infinitely small that they exist, and if they do, they must have a miserable time of it: Google only has 16 results for IE sucks from me (not all actually saying that), but then every now and then I remember to watch my mouth. Lots of people don’t, ever.

It’s fun to blow of steam by slamming whatever has recently annoyed you, but even Microsoft is actually made up of real human beings, mostly doing the best they can while stuck between a rock, a hard place, and a manager or two with very different goals than yours. While it feels like “IE sucks goats, and nobody should ever use it” is more likely to get noticed than “the IE CSS bug that messes up scrolling makes it really hard to do CSS layout”, the fact is that the first will just get you ignored by anyone who can actually do anything about it, while the second, turning up in someone’s Feedster search for “IE CSS bug”, has a chance (however small) of being heard.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2003 at 6:36 pm and is filed under blogging tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

24 Comments

Comment by Adam Conover #

2003-08-02 18:43:23

Hear hear.