Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Communication

  • Feature request: Thumbs up on email

    In work chats, I love that someone will put a thumbs up on a message rather than respond. I will hover over it to see who acknowledged it. To me it means, “what was communicated is complete. No questions. No additional feedback.” Probably it just means, “I accept this, but don’t want to drag this…

  • Company Storyteller

    Need to add to my LinkedIn something like “company storyteller.” There are individuals in the organization I know to ask the story about why we do what we do. Why do we have this firewall rule not not another? Why are we super strict about this thing but not another? I know many of these…

  • Tech drains English of meaning

    Semantic Drain and the Meaninglessness of Modern Work makes an interesting point that a problem with knowledge management work is that much of is filler work without a fulfilling purpose. I was far more stressed as the university webmaster than as a database administrator. The webmaster job was highly subjective with people getting upset about…

  • Superiority of visual notifications

    A sound is a terrible way to get my attention. I mostly live in some kind of background noise. So, there is a strong possibility that I will miss a notification through listening to music or podcasts. Worse, even if I do hear it, I have no clue what weird thing is trying to get…

  • Terminology

    This guy won the Internet for a while. “I love learning the words that their generation comes up with — both the unique ones as well as the ones where they take an existing word and give it a completely different meaning.” One of my favorite web sites is Urban Dictionary because people apply new…

  • Explainer

    Geeking out for me takes the form of the explainer. I take what someone knows about something and describe how it works and why I find it interesting. My reading takes me all over the place, but I particularly of late enjoy nonfiction on interesting topics. People find my reading about things like quantum mechanics…

  • Managing Expectations

    WaPo published Trump’s transcript from a recent interview with the AP. This exchange caught my eye. AP: Did they give you any sense of the timetable? Trump: I would say within a week. That’s my impression. He said two weeks. But they’re going to try and do it in less than a week. An instructor…

  • Framing Dangers

    Hurricane Michael leveled much of Mexico Beach, which is a place I know pretty well. Spread out over my lifetime, but a rough impression is, I think, I have spent about half a year at this particular town. That would rank it third longest of places where I have lived. Several people have expressed surprise…

  • Non-Update

    Nothing frustrates me more than the non-update. I define it as: a communication issued within the promised window of time to express the status of nothing has changed and to establish another window for an update. I am patient and willing to wait for a real update. When I see an email from someone I…