Charles on… anything that comes along

Do we just get the readers we deserve? Or is there something about writing email which disguises green ink? Or what?

Here’s some extracts from a couple of emails we received at Tech this week. One began:

Oh dear. Not for the first time reading ‘Technology’ in recent months, I am struck by how some of your writers, while posing as knowledgable on an issue, are exposed as being woefully ignorant. XXX… cannot help conceal inadequate understanding of the subjects!

(middle bit snipped)

…Having established last week that preferment within the journalistic profession nationally in the UK is more on the basis of attending the right private school and university, or on daddy having the right friends, perhaps in the case of ‘Technology’ at least the Guardian should look more towards WHAT their contributors know than who they know in the future?

While the writer had made some good points in the letter, the opening and closing paragraphs just suggested someone who wanted to get one over - without any cause, since there’s no suggestion that the writer has benefited from “friends”. Instead they’re someone who (a) writes good copy (b) gets good interviews (c) delivers to deadline. I don’t know what school they went to or who their father is.

Which made the letter’s opening and closing all the more unpleasant, in fact. People lose their minds a little when they get behind a keyboard. It’s the downside of having a readership that pushes back. Sometimes they have mental halitosis.

Then there’s the other - the full-frontal attack:

I started reading the article [”The end of the death march“] but I’m afraid you lost me when you said “But for more than a decade, he [Bill Gates] has had another interest: trying to improve the lot of the world’s poorest.”

Give me a fscking break why don’t you!

At that point I knew that your article was aimed at the gullible and that anything else that followed wasn’t to be counted on.

And when you query this with them, they send back screeds about how Microsoft is a monopolist. Uh, yuh. Robin Hood was a thief so he could give to the poor. There’s a wonderful irony in Gates’s (and now Buffett’s) actions: the rich countries which won’t forgive debt worth billions, might see billions flowing to them from the peoples and governments of those same poor countries whose debt isn’t forgiven. It’d make a Supreme Being chortle.

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