Inspired by...

[randomness]

...an ironic comment from dpolicar, and a (friends-locked) posting from redhound.

"(P)eople really don't read what you write. They read some sort of virtual text constructed from your title, a few fragments of your text, and whatever preconceptions may be stimulated by them. It's sort of amazing watching people rant about your failure to consider things you explicitly addressed."

"Hey, what do you have against reactions that completely miss your point? You want us all to understand you and respond relevantly, or something?"

I'd extend this to say that it's not just that people don't read what you write, they don't listen to what you say, or even watch what you do. As drbitch once observed, humans write stories; it's what they do. But they often pay more attention to the story inside their head than anything that may be playing out before them.

Comments

[tcb.livejournal.com]

(P)eople really don't read what you write.

this reminds me of something I'd heard about and even done a couple of times.. when writing some sort of internal document, stick a word in, say.. "Configure and then mount the kangaroo via NFS, and verify that the data is intact."

and see if anyone notices..

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

I hate to say this, but that would just leap right off the page at me...

[muffyjo]

Actually, we had a CD burner that was a kanguru duplicator with a built in hard drive so there is a realistic chance that I would have read that sentence, thought your spelling was off and kept going should I have thought you were trying to attach it to the computer box (server/desktop) you were describing.