Etiquette

I just stumbled over an extraordinary person in a discussion forum. He did about everything wrong to get an answer. Here are some of the highlights from some of his posts.

Anybody heard of OLE?

The interesting thing here is that the question was posted in an Apple forum, and OLE is Microsoft technology. A fairly big part of Macintosh users shun Microsoft, so asking about OLE was very optimistic.

But not only that, the question was not about what the poster wanted to do. It was not about what he wanted to achieve (for example inserting a spreadsheet in a word processing document). It was OLE and nothing else. He had made up his mind on what the solution was before defining the question.

...essential for many in the real world...

Here he attacks the first person who tried to help him for not living in the "real world".

Judging from the responses so far this is indeed a very limited forum.

He then goes on attacking the entire forum as "limited".

...responses have come from users who must be permanently engaged in posting items...

Then the people who tried to help him are attacked for being... too experienced?

...you either both lack work experience in using spreadsheets, or you don't quite grasp the usefulness and the essence of OLE model.

Still no trace of explanation of what the poster wants to actually achieve, just a remark that the people who tried to help are inexperienced and/or stupid. Further, there is no attempt to prove this lack of experience or stupidity. No attempt at promoting or explaining the advantages of OLE. Just a blanket statement that this Microsoft technology is so great that Apple should adopt it.

waste of time

Those three words, without capital W or any full stop or other punctuation, are so far the last entry from the original poster.

I disagree with the last entry. Other posters in the forum got going a quite interesting discussion about OLE and OpenDoc and other document models. This was no waste of time at all.

I still do not know what the original poster was actually after, and I am sorry if he wasted his time, but I would like to thank him for initiating an interesting discussion.

A typical result of OLE. Take an aspirin and try again tomorrow.