Category Archives: Thoughts

The Friendly Spam

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Spam (picture: Eddie Awad)

This is a problem I’ve been having ever since I’ve begun to be “famous” – not that I’m a celebrity, but lots of people come and go on my Autisme Infantile website, and mail me on a regular basis.

Once we’ve interracted, some people generally think it’s okay to put me, without my permission, on their newsletter list. When I had one or two e-mails a day, I managed, trying not to hurt anyone’s feelings by requesting they take me off the list.

These days, if I spend one day without Internet, it’s more between one and three hundred e-mails that await me when I log back and check my inbox. As much as I want to be of help, I can’t take this anymore. It’s very tedious to find something worth my attention in the middle of all those unwanted e-mails, ranging from this that could interest me (but I have no time to check further) to things that are really out of my interest area.

Most of those e-mails have no unsuscribe link, either. You have to personally drop a note to whomever sends you those, and try not to hurt their feelings when you ask nicely to be unsuscribed. Some will try to guilt you into staying on the list too (look, my cause is important too, what about the children?).

Because this is getting out of control (don’t even talk to me about people that feel I have to be in copy of any discussion ever e-mailed and those who send me jokes – not funny), I have decided that there is no more Mrs NiceGirl. I will drop two lines to ask to be unsuscribed. I will ask not to be included in mass e-mails. I will be curt, to the point, and also, I will spam you if you send me any newsletter I haven’t suscribed to.

Internet or the Random Block Shock

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I’m not a newbie on the internet. It’s no news flash to me that people spend their time arguing, blocking each other for good or wrong reasons. The lack of interest, I can understand too: you stop following someone that you have no interest in, you hide his updates. Door’s still open, you still care for the information or you still want to know if the person’s ok from time to time.

Then there’s the random block, and the shock that comes with it. You don’t understand why, but you’ve been banned from someone’s updates. It happened to me on Twitter today.

Now let’s be clear: I don’t follow many people on Twitter. The ones I read are the ones I care about, even if they sometimes have nothing to say for months, or on the contrary, too much to say about things that do not concern me. I like these people, I want to know how they are, what they’re doing. They are people I’m looking up to, for the most part.

And I don’t understand. I don’t go out of my way to be mean. At most, I can be a bit overwhelmed and not as chatty as everyone else. I don’t fight much with people, most of all if I’ve not been insulted first. So now what?

It’s something I’ve seen numerous times on Facebook: a person blocking another person, no apparent reason, or maybe even an unjustified reason, problems of understanding each other over the intarwebz. I never thought it would happen to me, too.

There’s a first time for everything, right?