La, la, la…I can’t hear you!

Another rainy Sunday (and a weird rain, more like a wintery, dreary day than our usual flash-flooding summer downpours)…so I’m sitting here writing a piece for a client. There are just so many ways that you can say “maximizing your return on investment.” Adding to the annoyance, this client favors big words & fancy language, not crispness and clarity, so it’s a particularly tedious piece. Therefore, my mind wanders.

On AQ, Ryan has a feature called ignore member. You can go in to someone’s profile and decide they don’t exist. Better yet, you can set the level of ignore, based, I guess, on how annoying you find them. Do you just not want to see their boxes? Check! Not receive any mail from them? Double Check! Make their message board posts not appear? Triple Check!

I just love this idea. And I wish Ryan could wave his magic reptilian wand and make it happen in real life too:

• Another phone call from your mother about how you HAVE to go to Cousin Sally’s wedding to the circus performer because otherwise everyone will think you’re fat and divorced?…No problem, you have your mother set to “no nag” – you can’t even hear these words. Family harmony is restored!
• Imagine… no uber-long, much-forwarded emails in your inbox from your father-in-law about the latest cancer scare or dangerous computer virus because you have him on the “can’t be bothered to check out Snopes” filter.
• And I’d set the president of the PTO on “no volunteer jobs.” I won’t say yes if I never hear them asking.
• But best yet? Until the kids appear before you bloodied and bruised, you don’t realize that they’re fighting…because they’re on “rainy day nitpicking fights with your brother” ignore.

In reality, I don’t have anyone set on ignore on AQ, as tempting as it can be. It sort of smacks of censorship, and certainly seems divorced from reality. I tried it with one person who really irks me with her bold pronouncements, but I changed it back after a few minutes. I felt guilty about using the feature.

The last week, I’ve gotten into a couple of minor tiffs with people, mainly over stupid stuff. I ignored my own cardinal rules of posting, which are 1. Never post if you don’t feel well (I had a pounding headache one day) and 2. Never, ever get in a back-and-forth discussion with that small select group of people who HAVE to have the last word. They won’t let it go, and I’ll just end up mad. There seem to be more of them roaming around than ever before, but I think that’s a simple function of the growth of AQ. My biggest guideline is that people don't need to hear from me more than once on a subject.

Letterboxers come in all stripes and colors, with all sorts of backgrounds, past experiences and lifestyle choices. This is part of what makes this hobby great—we all come together with a shared interest in one thing (and that we all approach differently), but those unique differences result in something for everyone. You just can’t expect that every box (and every boxer) are going to be a match for you.

There are many people out there who can’t seem to acknowledge that there are multiple points of view… people who believe solely in absolutes. I feel like I live my life in the shades-of-grey middle. When you’re there, you have to try and get along with both ends. And ignoring their existence doesn’t help you learn how to do that.