Or get off your ass and walk to the cube next door to ask the question directly and leave the IM for notifications that it is lunch time.

High-bandwidth voice communication, preferably in person, will always be superior to:

OMG teh class OhMyClass is teh sukh.

I think the problem is that the sender is deep into their task and doesn't remember that they need to bring the receiver up to speed.  I encounter this frequently too when somebody comes to my cube and asks a question.  I have to stop them and ask for the context.

Even face-to-face I have worked with a lot of people that have a hard time explaining the context of the problem. It's not IM, it's the people, unfortunately.

I'm with Sergio on this one.  Its the people.  

Reminds me of Marathon Man: Is it safe?

Pingback from  Reflective Perspective - Chris Alcock  » 2008 » March » 06

Same thing happens in email with the subject lines of "Error" "Help" "<Person name>" (last one: are they leaving the company?  Dying?  promoted?)

Some people are just clueless and IM just brings it more into your face as it interrupts you.

I've given up trying to educate people in proper IM etiquette and just ignore requests on there that don't include enough context.

This kind of thing happens on forums all the time too. People just throw down questions or thoughts and hit "submit" without making sure that they've given enough context for people to be able to help them.

For some reason they always seem to assume that the reader knows what's going on inside their heads.  I've had a <a href="rant.blackapache.net/.../">whinge about this on my blog if ya feel like having a look</a>.

In short: I feel your pain. This kind of thing drives me nuts! :)

Whoops! Sorry for messing up the markup! Link is: rant.blackapache.net/.../help-me-help-you

Cheers!

lol.. nice post

I'd like to add...

Unless you haven't talked for a long time, do away with "Hello", "Hi <name>", "Are you there?", etc. Just ask the question or say what you need to say.

I actually hate when people use acronyms that I don't have a clue wtf they mean when they are not standard acronyms or I'm just not up to date with the latest cool acronyms.  Just spell it out.

and honestly I also hate "lol" sounds like a stupid teenager response.

:P

It's been an exciting week, with a ton of news coming out of Mix 08! General Auto-Generating AssemblyInfo Files : Finally, a clean, elegant method to generating those pesky assembly info attributes at build time...both in Visual Studio and MSBuild! Look