When I was running the Helix Community IRC channel, I would get mildly frustrated with people who would show up and say “can I ask a question?” or something to that effect.
Apparently, the phenonena isn’t unique to Helix, and the frustration isn’t unique to me. I’ve seen lots of topic lines on Freenode stating “don’t ask if you can ask, just ask”. That lead me to think “hey, there should be a term for this”, so that when someone says that, you can reply with something short and sweet.
There may already be a term for this, which would be great. Please let me know. Otherwise, the most obvious thing is to acronymify it. So, here goes: daiycaja. “don’t ask if you can ask, just ask”. I’d love to see the following exchange on IRC someday:
- <newbie> can I ask a question?
- <grouch> daiycaja
- <newbie> diacaja?
- <grouch> google it
- time passes
- <newbie> i can’t find it
- <grouch> you spelled it wrong
- time passes
- <newbie> oh
Of course, they’d probably be pretty ticked off for getting the runaround, but they’d learn. Of course, if you’re in the grouch’s shoes, you could say “just ask” up front, but that just makes it look like you’re the only grouch in the world. Responding this way makes it a little more obvious that they’ve just violated some basic IRC ettiquette that they should learn a little more about.
This category of my blog isn’t called “nerd” for nuthin.
