ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

I went to @Media last year. It was great. I talked about it on my blog, I listened to various people speak, I got to talk to loads of intelligent, lovely people, and I got to see all sorts of fantastic presentations, and left having learnt a lot and feeling really inspired about web design.

It was bloody brilliant, in short.

However, I’m not going this year. As I’m not self-employed, and I don’t work for some ultra-hip design agency, and I don’t have oodles of cash lying around, it’s pretty much down to my employers as to whether or not I’m going. They’ve explained why they don’t want to send me, and without going into detail, I do understand their reasoning. Doesn’t stop me being disappointed, mind you, but as it’s their money, it’s clearly their call.

And that’s fine. I don’t have a problem with that.

What I do have a problem with though, is people rubbing it in. Firstly, I get a message in January telling me to register now to avoid disappointment. Then everyone else gets excited about it and people start signing up to it here there and everywhere. And then today…

…today, I get an email from Patrick Griffiths reminding me that I’ve only got five days left to register for @Media 2007 to qualify for the cheap seats.

Any minute now I’m expecting to get an email telling me that — just in case I wasn’t aware — there’s an event called @Media 2007 happening later this year, and it’ll be really great.

What a bastard. He’s just rubbing it in now, isn’t he?

p.s. I don’t really hate Patrick. After all, if it wasn’t for Patrick there wouldn’t have been an @Media 2006 for me to enjoy. And besides which, when I sent him an email complaining about him rubbing in my non-attendance at @Media 2007, he took it in good humour — precisely the way I’d intended it:

Bah! Now you’re just rubbing it in that I’m not going this year, aren’t you?Jack Pickard

Sorry about that:) Patrick Griffiths

Now it can be fairly hard at times to interpret tone in an email message: you don’t have inflection to go on, and particularly where you don’t know (or don’t know well) the other person, you’ve got to take all of your clues from what someone has written.

So I think Patrick has presumably picked up the fact I’m being jocular from the “Bah!”, and included a smiley on his comment to show that he got it too. And I just thought that it was impressive — assuming I picked Patrick’s tone up correctly — that we both managed to get the tone right from such limited cues.

Amazing what a you can tell from a “Bah!”, isn’t it?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Oddities, The Pickards, Web. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.