What’s Gotta Go

Thankfully I really haven’t seen this much recently, but it has happened often enough I feel the need to share this little habit with the world.  In my work, IM is a way of business communication now.  Of course I still have some personal dialogs that pop up throughout the day, but for the most part having IM on and available saves me plenty on face-to-face and phone call conversations that would a) take more time, and b) I would rather avoid.  I guess I am a geek at heart.  Shoot, there goes my online facade.

The little habit that annoys me is people that have had their ability to communicate in full sentences, much less entire paragraphs torn from their brains (if it was there to begin with) by the IM effect.  I blame AOL most, mainly because they are an easy target and most web geeks have more than enough reason to hate AOL anyway.

AOL pioneered (I think) the single line entry box format with the conversation appearing just above where you are entering your text.  Previously ICQ by default had the format of a box appearing with content, then you replied with an entire message window that disappeared when you sent it.  I was very used to that format, though I have to admit eventually I came to like the dialog history staying on the screen so I could leave and come back to a conversation, catching up to anything missed.  Since I tend to have 3-5 conversation windows open at a time with varying degrees of active dialog, it helps to keep the history up.

What AOL did, though, was created a whole generation of people that would work at keeping your attention by entering only part of their conversation before hitting enter/return and then continuing their thought.  What happens is a long list of short lines to make up a complete thought and disjointed sentence.  Something like this:

hey

you there?

got a question

what is

the answer to

blah blah

You get the idea.  This bugs me because it is either one of two things.  First, they person doesn’t believe I am going to stay on the line long enough to pay attention to their question.  In actuality, because of their typing format this is a self-fulfilling situation because I now will leave and come back to read the completed thought rather than waste my time waiting for the entire verbiage to make it to the screen.  Second, and I hope this isn’t true, there may be a tendency for people to treat the IM window like a typewriter, hitting the return key at the end of the line because they have filled the little box for their text.  Please, please tell me this isn’t true.
I do think there is a little of this born out of the fact that a lot of people don’t type that fast, so they figure they better get some of the thought there so you don’t give up on them.  This is likely why the different IM programs instituted the “typing” icon or message so you know that a response is still being formed.

I actually get a bit of enjoyment trying to predict what is happening on the other end of the conversation.  Typical situation:  I send question, pause happens then “typing” message appears shortly followed by response.  The ones that are fun is when you ask a question that perhaps requires a bit more thought or catches them off  guard, you see something like:  I send question, pause happens then “typing” message appears, then follows “so and so has entered text”, meaning they have stopped typing; then message goes away completely (meaning they have deleted their previous text), later to finally follow with the message and response.  What just happened there?  Did they write me back some snide response then thought better of it?  Did they write me something that was supposed to go to someone else, luckily realizing before it was sent that they had the wrong window?  Did they sit on their keyboard only to get back up and realize they almost sent “asd;flkjasdl;fkjasdf;lkj” to me?   So many fun possibilities!

So much analysis could be made into the IM psychology, but in short, I just want to say I wish more people would compose their entire thought and then send it my way.  I have the patience and I can then send you a worthwhile response.  Of course I don’t mean to say that everything communication must be a novel; I am a fan of the short question with the short answer.  Just get it done, and don’t try to hold me on the line.