On Wednesday 28 October 2020 07:41:17 Gene Heskett via tde-users wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 October 2020 08:04:43 Janek Stolarek wrote:
> > > You have me curious at this point, have neither of you worked in an
> > > office environment before?
> >
> > 1. I haven't. I work at a university, which isn't exactly office.
> > 2. Trinity mailing list is not an office environment. It's a place
> > created for technical discussion for people using TDE and needing help
> > with it.
> >
> > I have no intention (or, in fact, possibility) of forcing my opinion
> > here. If things continue the way they are at the moment I'll probably
> > unsubscribe from the list because I don't feel it serves its intended
> > purpose.
> >
> > Janek
>
> While I, long since retired, and now living alone at 86 yo, (the wife is
> in a rest home under hospice care) usually enjoy the chit-chat until its
> way way off topic, One can make new friends that way. So I have no
> objection to the "community" atmosphere.
>
>
> Cheers, Gene Heskett

And I believe that you've hit the crux of the matter, Gene. 

Some people -- forgive my generalizations, but they're probably pretty 
close -- have jobs, and must deal with technical issues as part of their 
work. As such, anything that veers more than a few inches off-topic, or which 
is not strictly business, or which annoys them for other reasons: well, they 
must regard our chit-chat not only as a waste of their time, but indeed as 
obstacles to whatever they are trying to do. 

Gene, being retired and living alone now, enjoys the same things that irritate 
others on the list. There are about half a dozen, maybe a dozen of us, who 
tend to get into these off-topic threads, which happen gradually at first, 
but then grow exponentially, like a snowball effect. I think it's that we get 
a few kicks out of one another, but not enough that we want to chat on a 
regular basis, nor to get too deeply into one another's lives. 

And I myself probably spend more time on the list at present, but only because 
I still have yet to recover data from that hard drive, which contains about 
40 years' of research, my entire digital library, field research, interviews, 
along with everything I ever wrote or published since about the year 1975. My 
plans for this winter (once I had got my new printer) were to hole up here 
like a total hermit, and bring my materials together into some kind of 
readable form. And then my hard drive crashed, and so far I've been stuck, 
and just spinning wheels. 

If I could only recover my data, then would only rarely see me here, as I do 
have better things to do with my time; only I cannot do them just yet. 

By the way, when one threatens (whether idly or "for real") to unsubscribe 
from the mailing list, then you are being passive-aggressive: if we won't 
play the game like you demand, you'll go home. 

But I don't want things to be this way. I would really like everybody just to 
get along, and it seems to me that we spend more time discussing this same 
ongoing problem than we do in trying to solve it. If you aren't going to 
recommend a solution, then you are just kvetch-kvetch-kvetching again. 

Don't worry, I won't live for ever; I may not even make it more than another 
year or two, unless things change dramatically for the better. And I do have 
something I want to accomplish yet before that time comes. If I didn't need 
to use a computer to finish this work, then I would never have gone online, 
never have joined a mailing list, and the world would be a better place

As it is, we are stuck with one another, and I suggest that we try to come up 
with reasonable, livable solutions, rather than complaining and wishing for 
more rules, more control my moderators, censoring or filtering or whatever 
other draconian measures some would envision, to try to control what they 
regard as chaos, and therefore, counterproductive or negative. (Some of us 
rather enjoy chaos.) 

I believe that Slavek, among others, has expressed a wish that we maintain a 
friendly and open atmosphere in the mailing list. On the other hand, we all 
know that the conversations go so far off-topic that we might as well be a 
social network sometimes. 

And this reminds me: I, and others, have mentioned something about creating a 
forum, where we could start threads on whatever we wanted, even (for example) 
archaeological discoveries in London's underground. 

Then we could keep the mailing list pure and uncluttered by off-topic stuff, 
which, one hopes, might keep the strictly-business types content. 

If anybody else has any actual recommendations or suggestions, then I think 
that now would be the time to come forward. Merely wishing for other people 
to shut up or quit the list, or threatening to quit the list oneself: this is 
not constructive or useful at all. 

And by the way, we waste far more time on these discussions than we do in 
occasional chit-chat. 

Bill
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