Comment by epr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epr | Hacker News Reader

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Chatting with my gf, we came up with a new section (mostly her):

=== General Inquiries ===

- Answer a question other than the one being asked. Feign misunderstanding.

- Give incomplete answers. Do anything you can to almost but not completely answer the inquiry .

- Delay answering as long as possible.

- Answer with a question.

- Request more information than required to answer an inquiry.

- Attempt redirection to other people or resources.

- Involve as many people as possible

- Rebuke the inquirer when they follow up on a previous unanswered inquiry within an arbitrary time window (days, not hours).

- When asked multiple questions, answer only only of them, ignoring all others. Wait to be prompted to answer each question individually.

- When asked multiple questions, answer the least important or time sensitive question first.

- Ignore all information provided besides the single question being answered.

- Prefer slower or more onerous communication methods 1. snail mail 2. email 3. text messaging 4. audio call 5. video call 6. in-person meeting

- Mix multiple communication methods

- If contacted using a lower ranking method, upgrade.

Yikes. I know people that behave very much like this naturally.

In particular, it took me a long time to a realise that for a lot of people communications is parsed by treating a series of requests or pieces of information as a FIFO. If you're lucky, it's fairly deep, but for some people it can only hold 1 or 2 entries at the time.

But when it's an e-mail or other interaction that they understand as "conversational", these people tend to not start acting on the output until the end.

So ask for 3 things, and chances are only the last one will still be in the queue by the time they've read your whole message. The rest will have just popped out of their mind and no longer exist in their world until they're prompted to re-read your message.

For people who act like that, seemingly the only way around it short of drip-feeding them questions one at a time that I've found is to present them with a document attachment and only one request: "Please follow the procedure in the attached document." And make them sign off. And provide a checklist if they're particularly difficult.

You basically need to make it clear that the list is not conversation. You can find people who are pathologically unable to process a list of instructions in an e-mail who are at the same time completely OCD about processing lists of instructions in a document, because they context-switch completely.

Of course in this context of "sabotage" this can be exploited to: Mercilessly attach all information in a bunch of separate documents, and add checklists and signoffs to everything. Especially to unimportant stuff.

That’s the point

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