One of the more frustrating things that nerdherders (and nerds) have to deal with is omnibus information - those annoying emails or bug reports that contain an often random collection of requests or problems all mashed together in a series of loosly connected paragraphs and long lists of dot points. They are hard to archive/file and if an email reply is warranted then the different issues get in each others’ way. When they are but in front of your more organised and anal-retentive nerds they say to him/her “I am sloppy and don’t care about information, I can’t keep track of my thoughts and don’t really care if you do either”. Basically, this sort of information is less useful that it could be and makes the job of those interpreting it harder than necessary.
Making it easy for your friendly local nerds to serve you better can be done by following a few simple guidelines. So without further ado here is the Nerdherding guide to helping yourself with requests to nerds:
- If you want to talk about two unrelated issues or problems then send two emails or create two bug reports. They can then be nicely moved through any process without tripping anything else up.
- If you feel the need to conserve bits and simply must combine multiple unrelated issues then please clearly number or label each separate item. I’m amazed by often in my career I’ve had to deal with work requests containing dot-point lists - its embarrasing for everyone when I have to say “tenth dot point in the second list”.
- If you have to communicate a high priority issue with other less important issues then please separate out the high priority issue. Its less likely to get lost in the noise and means that the less important issues won’t be ignored.
P.S. I must admit that sometimes I tend towards the “organised and anal-retentive” end of the spectrum.