Is it just me, or are you less patient than you used to be?
It all depends on what you mean. I’ve never been patient with fools, trolls, ninnies, sophists, fanatics and the other assorted riff-raff who attempt to lay claim to my time and energy. In fact, my impatience with such people is almost legendary; Grace describes the results of my being obstructed by such a person in real life or on the telephone as “maggieing”, and when someone behaves in a way that she knows from experience will precipitate it, she is often heard to say, “Somebody’s about to get maggied.” Offline, most of the recipients of this kind of vitriol are either bureaucrats or obfuscatory customer service people who have been trained not to give me what I want, but online they generally have some kind of axe to grind. Most of them are prohibitionists deliberately trying to waste my time, or seeking to make me look bad by drawing me into some kind of no-win interaction; others are such narcissists they actually imagine they have the right to make demands of me:
…Apparently, every last anonymous prohibitionist on the internet believes that I just lie about all day, looking at myself in the mirror and eating bonbons while my staff writes my blog; I…surely have unlimited time to refute all of his tinned arguments, look up links for him and restate…my entire professional oeuvre in convenient 140-character sound bites. As I told one such individual recently, I would take as much time with him as necessary if he were a legislator trying to push for decriminalization or a celebrity who planned to advocate it on national TV; I’m sure you won’t be surprised when I tell you that he was offended by the suggestion that he did not have the power to influence millions…
Even when confronted with trolling, I generally try to be as polite as possible:
…when it’s in the comments here I usually just employ my screening process so as to avoid subjecting my readers either to annoyance or to the unlovely sight of my eviscerating someone with my Medusan agony blade…On Twitter, however, it’s different; I was ingrained from a young age with the principle that it’s rude to ignore people, so when I’m in what I perceive as a public space (rather than my “home” here) I find it difficult to simply ignore drive-by comments directed at me. Since I hate arguments I start out politely and often finish the same way; sometimes the commenter reveals himself to be a troll or buffoon and I can excuse myself in good conscience within a few “tweets”. But other times I am confronted with someone who seems to imagine herself (and it’s nearly always a “her”) some sort of crusader going into battle against the great Sphinx, and to believe that I will surely flee from the light of Divine Wisdom as revealed to her by the Holy Polaris Project or the Prophet Melissa. But since I refuse to take anything on faith or to accept arguments from authority, and they never have any actual facts, they enter these battles of wits only half-armed at best. I still start out polite, but as they continue to reply with nothing other than the equivalents of “nuh uh,” “sez you,” “my mommy says so” or “you’re going to make Baby Jesus cry,” I tend to get a lot more ruthless…
If, on the other hand, you mean I seem less patient with readers and questioners, I’d have to say that I certainly hope it’s just your perception; I feel as though I’m just as patient and considerate of readers as I ever was, and that I answer questions just as thoroughly as I always have. The increasing constraints on my time have required me to spend proportionately less of it in direct responses to reader comments, but I’d like to think it hasn’t affected my manner any. If there is an area where I’m less patient, I would have to say it’s in my responses to people on Twitter who, though they are by no means trolls, are also unfamiliar with the body of my work; even if they’re very polite, I find it difficult to justify spending a lot of time interacting with only one person in such an ephemeral medium. In those cases I’m always a bit relieved when someone else takes over the discussion, freeing me to do other things and perhaps throw in my 2¢ later; I’d like it even better, though, if they’d come here and enter into the lively discussions in the comment threads.
(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)
Reblogged this on Pycraftsworld’s Weblog.
Reblogged this on hocuspocus13.
Just wanted to leave you my initial thought when reading the original question. “I am less patient than I used to be. Are you also less patient?” I blame technology and the split focus on work and life that makes me always feel late or hurried.
I agree, in my day job work, I’ve had to put up with idiots and people who you tell how we do things but they would rather throw tantrums, but you’re supposed to be PO-LITE to them. I’ll retire soon, then I’ll tell them what I REALLY think of them.
maybe i’m at a net disadvantage – pun intended – by not bothering with twitter at all – but it saves a lot of time
I keep thinking I might want to get on twitter but something about the 140 character limit holds me back. Might be my dislike of text speak. I approve of grammar and spelling
I don’t know about less *patient*, but you do seem to spend more time railing against the hated Them than you used to, and less time discussing the life, business, and history of whoring. I find this disappointing, because I find the latter fascinating and the former repulsive.
(I bring this up only because you seem to be inviting criticism; it’s your blog, and you’ve no obligation to run it any other way)
I can’t speak for twitter; I refuse to touch it unless and until the 140-character limit is removed.
Hello Maggie it is I, Warbling, prevaricator and, according to your very own lights, nothing less than a suspected “troll”!
Might I advise that your swiftest consigning of one of my first real comments on yr blog ever, to this wretched zone-of-classification, followed just as quickly by an ignoring of my subsequent ‘self-defense’, is recalled to me rather abrubtly now reading what you have to say above…?
I do realise that taking you to task on an anthropological basis and indeed, then cringing as i did at your apparent blithe participation in what I would basically call The Neuromania of the Zeitgeist (just check the anagrams one gets from that!), is gonna be contentious as hell from the get-go; but MM I kid you not when I say that I plought – can I get away with plought? – my troth in THAT direction rather than pursuing things directly related to my own psychosexual/esthetic complexity, purely because I thought THIS
would make me approximate more closely so to speak to your ‘intellectual equal’, instead of someone just posing agonising experiential-riddles which you almost certainly couldn’t be expected to solve for me!
Clearly that gambit went all pear-shaped in a trice, but here, as a result of having been addressed as it were by name – you actually asked me at the time “..or are you a troll?” as if I could be expected to self- identify as such rather than simply be the butt of your accusation – am I popping up again with about seventeen virtual tons more self-consciousness than I probably should have, and asking if you might from here on in possibly allow more latitude if you can to those of your great fans and champions who have almost as complicated a relationship with their own language and its execution as they do by now with ..with the opposite/oscillatory sex..?
I have proselytised your paradigm-busting oeuvre from New Zealand to Sarajevo and Sao Paulo to Singapore, from the mad bosom of my family to the frantic heart of social media, and have taken more flak in the process than a Flying Fortress over Dortmund I swear, thus it is that I ask here Maggie what I do ask, for your future most hopefully delighted reference, deference of course by means of a newly-emergent sign, and ALL who might possibly sail within her…..
so help me Trollelujah!!!
Very common for female human primate mammals of “Maggie’s” alleged age to find themselves less patient on many levels – one part of the female initiated divorce peak that I understand shows up in the data in their late 40’s and early 50’s. See Brizendine’s “The Female Brain” for some of the underlying mechanism and correlation. I’m guessing that even someone who was missing some parts of the hormonal system would still experience some of this as other parts of the meat machine go through whatever changes are related to the lifecycle. And common enough for all our rational forebrains to deny how much impact the bio-chemistry has on our decision making, but Kahneman and others have a growing body of evidence in how good we are at self-deception. In any case, I have also noticed a growing . . . stridency here.