Yes, there are perils to attaching emotion to text-only communications. If one forms an attachment to a certain impression of a particular emotional profile, then one is unlikely to perceive emotions that contradict that bias because text sucks at accurately conveying emotions. Especially if one internalizes bad impressions and lets them fester.

Your response was "tye does not recall seeing any poll suggestions from Arunbear". You know fully well that there was no shortage of poll suggestions. There was no reason for me to make a new poll suggestion it would have just gone into storage along with all the others. My question was a prelude to offering to help with posting polls since that is what was not happening. But you chose to have a go at me instead of having a useful discussion.

You chose to interpret my statement (which you don't dispute the accuracy of) as "having a go at you" and so you chose to not have a discussion at all. You complain that I didn't read your mind and understand that you were trying to help. While you tried to read my mind and found some malice which wasn't actually there. If you want to complain about poor quality of communication over a text-only medium, then perhaps you should actually try to put more of your communication into text (the mind reading isn't working too well for you in either direction at least in my case, from what I can tell).

You know fully well that there was no shortage of poll suggestions.

No, you've read my mind incorrectly yet again. What I "knew" was that there was obviously a real shortage in poll suggesions that inspired any of the pollsters/gods to actually promote one to being a poll. What I perceived was that a ton of old and new suggestions had been turned into polls at a rate faster than new suggestions were coming in (but I also mostly dismiss incomplete poll suggestions where somebody posts an idea for a poll or parts of a poll but doesn't bother to actually do the work to finish writing the poll, which I believe is the hard part -- as I've written nodes about so I won't explain further here) and that the few-and-far-between suggestions (that I'd noticed in the time before your comment) I found quite uninteresting and the several other people who had actually demonstrated the willingness to promote other people's poll suggestions certainly hadn't been inspired either (though I didn't presume to know what prevented their inspiration; I find that lots of possibilities are easy for me to imagine).

But, although you know that I enjoy expending extra effort to be uncivil, I did not actually reply to each poll suggestion to note "that sucks" or "I don't find this suggestion worthy of promoting to a poll" (though I have replied to several poll suggestions to offer more civil, helpful criticism than that). If people are enjoying the polls that you have been promoting of late, that is great, and I thank you. My reaction has been primarily "meh", which is, of course, fine; it is quite clear that there have been polls that I quite enjoyed that some quite disliked. That is why the system works best when there are several people picking polls that they feel are worth promoting. Just like our "moderation" "system" -- nodes get approved when somebody finds them appropriate even though many may not perceive what makes them appropriate (to some).

There was no reason for me to make a new poll suggestion

Wrong. If you had bothered to actually communicate your desire to help (other than psychically) such as wanting to join pollsters, then I would have still pointed to your lack of contributed poll suggestions. When the then-moderator of the rec.humor.funny newsgroup was looking for a replacement, the primary prerequisite was somebody who had already demonstrated the ability to post a joke that got accepted to that newsgroup. Previously when this subject came up, the conversation quickly progressed to me suggesting that others post poll suggestions and, if they post ones that are well liked, they might become members of pollsters (if they so desire). I find that the promotion to privileged groups works better when the one requesting promotion can demonstrate their worth at the related responsibilities.

But you chose to leave the conversation. And I guess I was supposed to read your mind and realize that your "departure" was due to your feelings having been hurt? Just like you know to read my mind and know that when the situation is reversed that I'm "ignoring you" (because I'm smarter than you and I don't have to answer to anybody).

Then there was a time when you created a bogus consideration and as it was being voted on you remarked "Heh. So few passed the intelligence test."

That is a reference to an old answering machine joke. Somebody set their recorded greeting to "The following is an intelligence test" (which is then followed by the standard, obligatory "beep"). Would you pass that test? Do you consider yourself a stupid person? If you answer 'yes' to the second question, then you might also be offended by the experience (or you might be accepting of your own assessment of your stupidity).

I'd probably not pass that test completely. And I've certainly said of such failures in the past "That was stupid" (of me). No, I don't consider myself a stupid person. I don't consider most people I converse with to be stupid people either. But I, like most people I've met, do no shortage of stupid things. So if you choose to take offense at actions being alluded to as being "stupid", then you will likely continue to be offended by things I say (because people including me aren't going to stop doing stupid things, I'm not going to stop noticing some of them, and I will still sometimes comment on some of the ones I notice).

I recall (vaguely) alluding to that joke twice. Once with a node that somebody else had posted that got considered and once with a joke node that I posted anonymously that got considered. But when you post a laundry list of vague descriptions of past evils many from months ago, I wouldn't find it shocking if my recollection of some of them (including this one (or two?)) was flawed. Actually, I think it was more than a year ago. I guess your grudge has been festering for a very long time indeed.

So, after all of this time, this is the worst you've come up with? Wow, I'm quite impressed with how civil my lower limit is over such a time range. Have I told you that you were stupid? Have I even attributed an action to you and called that action stupid? I'm not perfect and I sometimes get annoyed and I'm not always as polite as I might like to be, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'd identified a specific action attributed to you and called that "stupid" even though I realize that doing so would be somewhat rude (not as rude as calling you "stupid", or as doing any number of things that are all-too-common in an internet "flame").

Wait. Did you vote on (one of) the consideration(s) in a way that I might have been characterizing as "failure to pass the intelligence test"? So I may have hinted that an action that had not been attributed to you might be a failure to pass an intelligence test. Have you ever taken an IQ exam? Did you get every single question right? If so, why are you so sensitive about being called stupid? If not, were offended when you were told that you hadn't passed all of the tests of your intelligence that had been included in the exam? Did you tell the person who told you these results that they were being uncivil? Did they boggle at you in response? Did you publicly announce your personal laundry list of past incidents where you also found them to have been uncivil? Did you then pat yourself on the back for you excellent example of civil behavior?

Your response was not only unhelpful but also particularly insulting as I had already stated that I didn't understand the what that link was meant for.

What? Because you don't currently understand something, there is no way that you will ever understand it unless somebody delivers "the answer" to you? I don't actually presume that you are that stupid. My expectation is that you are intelligent and are capable of learning things through research and even realizing new things via just further comtemplation. Perhaps you were assuming that I had "the answer" and just refused to give it to you?

Consider a fictional CB "conversation" that seems fairly typical of PerlMonks to me: "I don't see any reason for Perl to have undef" "If you look the wrong places, you won't see what you are looking for" "What is the purpose of undef?" <crickets />.

You get better answers on PerlMonks if you give better information. "Show us what you've already tried". There is a small chance that I actually did have an easy answer to whatever your question was and I didn't feel like throwing you a fish because it seemed like something you should be able to fish for easily enough yourself. More likely, I didn't have "the answer". In either case, demonstrating what you had already done (or were now doing) to try to understand the link would have made it more likely that I would have found something helpful yet simple enough to make it worth trying to convey via the CB.

You often get lousy answers at PerlMonks when you simply declare defeat without demonstrating any real effort. You'll also often be disappointed if you call out a specific person to answer your question. If you still want to know what the link is for, you might want to ask in the appropriate wiki (and you might want to provide some clues to help others figure out why you don't understand the purpose and because such also demonstrate your effort).

On the other hand you remarked last week that "I wanted to smack Josh and Dave because ..." ..., so it may be that you are abusive to people at work too (but some how I doubt that because people in the workplace have a certain amount of legal protection from bullying and harassment).

Well, I'm glad I didn't say "I wanted to kill..." because I guess then you'd be informing me that it is usually illegal to murder coworkers. "I wanted to kill" indicates rather strong annoyance. I rarely get annoyed to that level, especially at work. "I wanted to smack" is an indication of something very mild. But it is nice to know that your imaginings are not just limited to thoughts and feelings that you want to put into my head.

Why do you have a lower standard for relating to colleagues at Perlmonks compared to work?

Do you collect years of anecdotes about coworkers and then publically post them at work?

Do you think (as your "intelligence test" remark suggests) that you are better than everyone else?

Actually, most of the things you have complained about are in part due to the fact that I expect others to be intelligent and resourceful and I realize that there is almost nothing that I am the sole source for answers about.

Or does being chief administrator (hence accountable to nobody) give you some kind of licence to be abusive?

Hey, what happened to my headdress? I'm not sure where you got the idea that I'm "chief administrator". vroom and many others certainly predate me. Many others have no less "rank" or privileges than me. So the only reason I would be "chief" would be simply because I'm still doing some small amount of "administrating" after all of these years and/or because I do more "administrating" than other gods. (I'm not claiming that I do more "administrating" than other gods, just trying to guess what your perception is based on.) But neither of those possible perceptions means that I somehow outrank all others and lord my singular position (of still being here and occasionally doing something) over all of the peons that I chortle at abusing.

Actually, what is most freeing as regards to my current position at PerlMonks is that I am not the "only" of anything. That and the fact that I tried to take administrating PerlMonks seriously and I actually have better results all around since I've given that up.

I answer to lots of people. I'm not sure I have to answer to any of them. So does your timidness to deal with perceived slights when they happen and with whom they happened make you feel you have license to collect your laundry list of perceived wrongs and post them in public? Of course, I'm not accountable to you so I'm not sure why you are even trying.

BTW, I'm almost never involved in a "conversation" in the CB. I'm almost never "in the CB". This is part of why I almost never say "hi" nor announce my departure. The pace of the CB almost never reaches a point where it becomes the primary object of my attention, much less the only one. What would be rude and unprofessional of me at work would be to respond to a question with "You'll have to ask me later. I wrote a sentence 6 minutes ago and after the first 3 of the minutes since then, somebody responded to that sentence. And now that I've finished my 6 minutes of doing several different work tasks, I've looked back and noticed this reply and I must now continue the 'conversation' that I started."

So if I write something in the CB, it is usually terse and one-off. Perhaps a solitary response to some things that were said over the previous 60 minutes (or perhaps something even less part of a "conversation"). But I have every expectation that I will be unable to respond to any responses that it might itself generate. I will certainly try to check back within the next 60 minutes so that I can at least see such responses. I am often able to respond within the next 500 seconds before the responses scroll off. Often I am not.

So such a communication mechanism (with its strict limitation on length of utterance and even count of utterances that are practical) often doesn't fit well with being "sufficiently observing or befitting accepted social usages" of more typical communications. And my own penchant for dry humor, terseness, obliqueness, puns, obscurity, etc. doesn't move my communication style in the CB closer to what you might consider "civil" and certainly can often be perceived as "condescending".

I consider the majority of viewers of the CB to be quite intelligent and don't consider my own insights on just about any topic to be uniquely relevant over the insights others may consider worth sharing. So if I don't have anything particularly insightful to share (and nothing I find humourous), I likely won't say anything, waiting to see if something more worth saying occurs to me. If no other utterances appear in the CB, then that is likely the end of the "discussion".