All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

"daft" is offensive?

gav on 2003-04-02T17:10:04

We have a client who likes to make really complicated pages. Some are so tall you have to scroll 4 or 5 screens to get to the bottom and contain 40 images to reach 150-200k sizes. They then like to complain that they are slow and it's our fault.

Anyway, the point is escaping me here. I sent an email internally which said "I count 13 items. That's daft.", which seems to be causing some discussion here (especially due to me CC'ing my boss) that it was a bad choice of words as it suggests the client is stupid.

Am I an overly blunt person? Should I be more careful not to cause offense? Does anyone care?

Daft customers

dws on 2003-04-02T17:44:27

It's a good practice to stay neutral whenever you're committing something to virtual paper. Internal emails have a way of escaping into the wild. At some point during an exchange, someone might add something particularly insightful, and someone else will forward it to the customer, forgetting that there's some non-customer-friendly language deep in the email. At that point, it's hit-and-miss. Some customers appreciate having their problems pointed out, but will go ballistic if they feel they're being dissed.

Well you wrote it.

Sifmole on 2003-04-02T18:53:21

You wrote it with some meaning in mind didn't you? What was that meaning? Without knowing you from Adam , if I read that I would certainly infer that whoever wrote it felt that the decision to have 13 items was a bad decision; and further that the decision was stupid or ill-informed.

Think about what you meant when you wrote it -- just because you change the word doesn't take away the meaning.

You Farking Farker.

Re:Well you wrote it.

pdcawley on 2003-04-03T06:42:04

As an Englishman, I read 'daft' as a toned down version of "The client has not fully thought through the implications of their choices". It is, course, understood that use of the phrase "The client has not fully thought through the implications of their choices" in email is far stronger language than 'daft', carrying with it the approximate meaning "The client is flaming idiot who shouldn't be allowed out in public without close supervision from people who know what they're talking about, and should certainly never be allowed to use a computer."