The Time Has Come For A Reckoning

I freely admit that I don't warm up to your friends all that quickly except in rare cases. For the most part, I hold you in such high esteem that there's a pretty insurmountable bar for the other people in your lives. It's not that I don't expect them to live up to it, it's just that you deserve the best and I feel antipathy towards those of your circle who seem unworthy of you.

Which is why I am proposing a cull. You see, in the past couple of weeks, a number of you have sent messages to a large group of your friends via Facebook. And a COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE NUMBER of those friends have had the poor taste to reply-all. To my mind, reply-all is the Hindenburg of our technological age: ambitious, but ultimately a complete and utter disaster. The only only only time I have ever used reply-all is at work when, for example, I receive an email addressed to, say, 4-7 people about something we're all working on that needs a response everyone can read, and I maintain that's the only time it should be used. If you send out an email that says, "does anyone know a good place to get a taco in St. Louis?" I don't need to see EVERYONE's response. Only you need to see that. So my getting 5-6 million responses that range from "El Tacqueria on 7th and Main" to "nope" to "i like tacos :)" makes me a little homicidal.

Why are your friends like this?

Are they mentally challenged? Blind, perhaps? Are they all such egomaniacs that they think their little responses are of interest to the rest of the distribution list?

I propose a test: send out a mass email or facebook message and see which of your recipients replies-all; then unfriend those that do, virtually and in real life.

It will make my life much much better, and it will go a long way towards ensuring that you surround yourselves only with those people worthy of your company.