Why emailing is better than dealing with people face to face...or maybe not.

I belong to a couple of email discussion groups. There are some personalities that sometimes make discussion a bit difficult. Sometimes, like this morning, I have an urge to write back, "you moron, you moron, you moron, you moron, you moron!" and then a stream of curse words.

I resist, and yet I wonder if I would be able to resist if they were sitting accross from me, uttering such balderdash. Then I have to think, "would they still say the daft crap they do, if they could not do it in the privacy of their own basements?"

Probably not.

But even then, these sort of people would probably still be stuck in their basements, getting even stranger. So, in the long run the internet is a good thing, because it gives these dementos some small sort of social interaction.

My first experience with internet pests was on a Music Theory listserv. There was a grad student (the worst always are) who had something (and yet, strangely enough, nothing) to say on everything. When you would have had enough and would send her a mildly biting email, she would go ballistic and threaten doom and gloom and the wrath of the list manager. Eventually several of us had an informal Anti-Theresa M. Society (anyone who was on the Music Theory Listserv in the mid-1990's will know exactly who I am talking about) that was quite a fun second thread, where we would discuss the topics at hand when the main list was clogged with Miss M.'s nattering.

Now, I have never met the aforementioned M. in person, and perhaps those who know her will testify to a smart, talented, personable sort. Frankly I doubt it. My guess is that her colleagues all hate her, her professors tolerated her only insofar as they could use her for grunt work, and that undergraduates who had to suffer under her dropped her classes at the slightest valid excuse. So, her only social outlet was the internet, with the rest of us drafted as unwilling and unwanted social skills coaches (and that is a gas! Me, giving advice to folks on how to get along with people: speak as loudly in German as you want and carry a howitzer).

Perhaps without that outlet she would have turned into a vampire.