Oops! Thursday

Today's topic is instant messaging. The point to be made? Slow down!

At IBM, we used an IBM instant messaging program called SameTime. One of the problems with the program, at that time, was that the default setting was for new messages to pop to the front of your screen, even while you were typing into another SameTime (ST) window.

My buddy, Ed, and I were STing about one of our colleagues, a woman on the east coast who should have retired five years earlier. To say she was dense would be a gross understatement. I was shocked at one point to learn this woman possessed an M.B.A. Her business sense, her logical thinking abilities, and her usefulness to our storage Web team were just a shade above nonexistent.

In the middle of a ST conversation with Ed, a message from this woman popped up. I typed, "How stupid can one person be?" and hit send. Oh shit. I thought I typed it to Ed, and then realized I had typed it back to her.

I immediately started typing to her, purposefully, that the message hadn't been directed to her, but to Ed. She typed back, asking what I had been talking about. I started making up things on the fly, telling her one of my children had done something that I thought was incredibly stupid. Then she wanted to know more, and I spent the next 20 minutes writing on-the-spot fiction until she was placated and felt she had helped out with my emotional turmoil. If I had saved that ST message, I could publish it today and retire from full-time employment—it was that good!

So the moral of the story is: slow down; make sure you know where your words are going; and be careful what words you translate into pixels.