People Who Annoy Me

April 25, 2009 — originally posted on Neopythonic

It's Grumpy Saturday. If I didn't respond to your email or "friend" request, maybe you fall in one of the following categories.

1. People who have exchanged some email with me (or who once commented on my blog, or were once in the same line at a conference) and send me a Linkedin friend request with the default invite message.

2. People I've never heard from asking to become my friend on Facebook.

3. People who send me a long form letter inviting me to speak at their conference, without any kind of personal note at the top.

4. People who resend that form letter three times.

5. People who get all upset when I respond to the last identical copy of that form letter with "Please stop spamming me."

6. People who send me a long rambling email asking me a Python programming question.

7. People who send me a long rambling email proposing a change to the Python language.

8. People who collect pictures of famous people's desktops.

9. People who send me email asking if they can put their ads on my website.

10. People who create fake blogs with computer-generated pseudo-nonsense text that happens to include my name.

Comments (16)

eekim — April 25, 2009

Oh come on. You've got to admit the desktop thing is kind of fascinating. ;-)

Anonymous — April 25, 2009

I'm looking forward to seat at your same line at PyCon-it so I can send you a friend request! Just kidding :)

Jason — April 25, 2009

"How about 'excessively negative people'?"
--Hobbes

Gopalakrishnan Subramani — April 25, 2009

You are an Icon Guido.. Think about Obama :-))))

Mike Verdone — April 25, 2009

Number 10 is especially annoying to me too. I have Google Blog Search searching my name (cuz I'm vain like that) and it invariably finds spam blogs with recycled text from my blog or software project pages. I wish I could, like, inform Google that the blog is spam whenever I stumble into one of these. Hmm... feature request.

Vasudev Ram — April 25, 2009

I agree.

Just send such people some shocking answer - maybe from a Monty Python episode - or any other suitable source ... :-)

Teifion — April 26, 2009

What about the silent majority that read your blog yet never post until they suddenly feel left out?

kcunning — April 26, 2009

My favorite are people I happened to work with for a short (think weeks) period asking me to connect to them on LinkedIn. Bonus points if they left only destruction and decay in their path.

I usually reply: "Tell me five things you know about me, that you can't find through Google."

Usually takes care of it.

Lennart Regebro — April 26, 2009

Yeah, my Zope google alert discovered three bot accounts on Livejournal yesterday. One was mostly a copy of one of my posts. Very annoying indeed.

I wouldn't be annoyed if somebody asked me for a copy of my desktop, I would be worried. That's seriously whacked.

I'm with Guido 100% on these things, except of course that most of it doesn't happen me. :) But I would be annoyed if it did.

Unknown — April 27, 2009

What a brilliant idea. Collecting screenshots of famous people's desktops.

I think you should indulge us on that one!

Guido van Rossum — April 27, 2009

OK, I'm giving in. Rather than respond to all the personal requests though, I'm just posting a copy of my Desktop for all to see. I actually made a video of it so you can watch me edit Python. :-)

http://tinyurl.com/bqqrvx

Danny D — April 27, 2009

Oh god I fell for it. Well played. And I guess I can discard that draft email asking for help on my Python project.

Braden — April 27, 2009

Aw, I fell for it too. Disappointment.

Tyson — April 27, 2009

Hey, I read your blog post. CAN WE BE FRIENDS?!? OH GOD PLEASE VALIDATE ME!

Steve — April 28, 2009

Guess there's no point asking you to contribute an On Your Desktop post, then?

hanshartmann — May 18, 2009

I don't know in which group I fall. However, I love Python and IMHO you did a great job in developing it.
Since my 1980-years - that were dedicated to FORTH - I never was so happy with a specific language.
And I am not a programmer:) At least not by profession...