Comment by pards
I have several responses depending on how ornery I'm feeling
1. Respond with, "Hello. How can I help?", or
2. Wait until 5:30pm then respond, "Hello" and close my laptop for the dayI have several responses depending on how ornery I'm feeling
1. Respond with, "Hello. How can I help?", or
2. Wait until 5:30pm then respond, "Hello" and close my laptop for the dayYep. This is the way I’ve ended up handling it. I believe it has been established now that these interruptions in flow (context switching) have a cost in terms of time taken to refocus on a task. Minutes vs the few seconds it took to have that focus broken and clicking away into a single word DM.
That’s what I do. There’s been plenty of times where the conversation never actually begins
And thats why you guys are working with computers and not people, cause that's pretty rude. What they are doing is only rude if they are aware that it annoys people. You response is rude nonetheless since it's a version of "that'll teach them" which is a pretty immature way of handling disagreements or conflicts.
A more mature way would be for "first offenders" to politely reply hi and help them with whatever they need and then when everything is done politely point out that asking directly would be better next time, perhaps with a link to some version of nohello.net. With "repeat offenders" sure, go ahead with what you are doing.
> And thats why you guys are working with computers and not people
In my experience, even the comically over the top people-persons will be curt to chatty people if they're swamped with a task that doesn't revolve around verbal ability.
They'll also bounce back to "they won't put down <tool> and talk to me" gossip about the nerds once their deadline pressure is released. But whateves, that's life.
I’m actually very good with people. But this is chat. Would you email someone and just say hi?
If I were using email as a realtime chat service, sure. I mean personally I probably wouldn't but it's certainly not unreasonable.
Intentionally ignoring people or otherwise being difficult out of spite is immature and disrespectful. That said, I see no reason to sit and wait for a response. Wait until I'm free (if it was urgent he should have specified that), reply "hi", tab out, and the thread goes back on the stack with all the others. No special treatment one way or the other.
Is tab-h-i-CR-tab really so onerous? Personally it doesn't even interrupt my line of thought.
Lately I've been going with 3. No response, people that have something important eventually follow up their lonely hello with their actual question/issue, the rest just forget about it I guess so the conversation never starts.