Pandoras Box wrote:Dredging up a dead forum? Yes indeed. My apologies. I hope no one minds.
r_h_ wrote:
Something I'm surprised nobody else has yet mentioned:
When a stranger initiates contact with me over the Internet with some variation of "Hi, how are you?" I feel a potent sense of dread curdling in my guts.
As such, it's empty of meaning. It's uninteresting. It's banal.
Your manners could be perfectly fine. But you might need to work on your game.
Yes.
Yes.
A thousand times, yes.
Also, every thing else in this forum.
TOTALLY. "potent sense of dread curdling in my guts" ahahaha exactly. I hate that opener with a vengeance.
It happens a lot in the chat room too. What I particularly loathe about it is that the opener sits back feeling all smug that he's (yes he. When was the last time a she said that to anyone?) been all polite and non-creepy. But in fact what he's done is put the onus on someone he doesn't know to come up with a witty, entertaining answer. Because if I respond "fine thanks" it sounds curt and rude, at least it does to my ears, because that conversation is now DEAD. I might as well say "oh jog on mate" since it will have the same effect.
So rather than be rude and curt, I feel obliged (which is SO ridiculous, I mean, I don't even know this person and never wanted to talk to them anyway) to say "good thanks, exhausted from work but thinking about making a present for my friend's birthday, by the way what does anyone think about the new Dr Who?" because then there's "oh what do you do for a living?" and "oh what are you thinking of making?" and "love Peter Capaldi but I wish they'd chosen a black woman" as conversational gambits for the other person. Because I have a glimmer of emotional intelligence and know that conversations aren't generated out of zero-interest bland questions, they're created out of
giving people the opportunity to bond or sparkle or show their witty side.
Do other people feel the same sense of obligation? I feel I have to come up with that whole sentence which frankly took a good couple of minutes of hard thought to put together (and agonising over why I'm bothering). All to answer some asshat who I don't even want to know (and I know that for sure. Because if they ask stupid things like that,
they have no game).
So what's the answer? When someone says "hi, how are you?" in a personal message, it's simple, I just don't answer. I don't get that on IM because I only give my address out to people with more conversational dexterity than that. But what do you say if someone says it in chat? "Fine thanks. And I hope you get that that is a put down." hmmm ruuuude.
Re the whole not-responding-to-IM question: sometimes I just don't want to chat with even the lovely bunch of carefully-selected freaks and nutters I have on my IM list. Maybe I am hoping that one particular person comes online because I have a question for them, so I'm leaving my light on. Maybe I don't want to talk to that guy because he's into stuffing and I'm not in the mood today, or maybe I only want to talk to people who are going to tease me rather than seek teasing from me.
But forgive me, sometimes I don't want to ruin your day by being brutally honest about that. If a person innocently pops up and says "hi" do they really want to hear: "I'm sorry I'm in a really bad mood and I'm only really looking to speak to a small percentage of my friends who are funnier than you - don't take it personally because when I'm in the mood for a really in-depth convo about the joys of weight gain you're deffo my go-to man." I mean, it's honest, but frankly who wants to hear that? So yeah, I'm lazy and/or non-confrontational, and I just ignore... Don't worry, it doesn't mean I hate or disrespect you, it just means, talk another time, okayyyy?
) or feels that I have not earned the right to talk to them and I do not deserve to chat with them.
