[Nottingham] Response on awareness day

[Mike Cardwell]

Michael Simms wrote:

 > Well, greetings to all LUG members.
 > I'm sorry, but this email is not going to be a nice one.
 > To be quite frank, I am disappointed, bordering on disgusted with the
 > LUG members, and this includes everyone on the list.

You don't appear to understand the "real" function of the list. 
Regardless of whether or not you want it to be this way, people like my 
self sign up to LUG lists in order to learn technical information that 
would be useful to them at home and at work. We are hear to learn about 
Linux and to pass on useful information as long as it doesn't interfer 
with our daily routines. I personally have no desire to take part in any 
community effort to drive Linux and I don't feel guilty for that. Linux 
is an operating system, not a way of life. This list to me is something 
to glance at if I see an interesting subject. I don't even know who you 
are or any details regarding this awareness day other than it is 
happening (or not?) and I'm sure *most* of the 400 people on this list 
feel the same way. You may see that as unfortunate, but most of those 
400 subscribers wont be reading your reply anyway.

Insulting people will not help your cause.

 > Do you know - myself and a few others have invested a lot of time and
 > effort into this awareness day. All we asked of the rest of you is a
 > little bit of a commitment that would have taken 10 minutes of your
 > time.

No I didn't know that, and frankly I don't care.

 > A week ago I asked people on the mailing list to send in the addresses
 > of 5 different schools or companies that may be receptive to Linux. We
 > have 400 people, give or take, on the mailing list, and how many have
 > responded? ZERO.

Because 400 people don't care?

 > I have 100 stamps here with nowhere to send their letters to. I would
 > like to personally thank each and every one of you for wasting my money
 > on that.

It was your mistake. You wasted your own money. You should have bought 
stamps later instead of assuming that you would need them.

 > I asked the LUG if we could have a discussion on the mailing list about
 > the information we would send to a newspaper that not only was willing
 > to put in a free ad, but actually wanted to do a *story* on Linux and
 > the awareness day. How much response from that have we had? ZERO. Its
 > too late now, we missed the window. We lost the chance.
 >
 > Martin has asked for people to let him know if they can do the awareness
 > day on the Friday. How many people have come back to him and say they
 > can? ZERO.

Yes. Are you starting to get the idea now?

 > So far Ive invested about 70 pounds of my personal money, and a fair bit
 > of my time (yes, I run 2 companies and work about 12-14 hours a day, and
 > I managed to find the time, so lack of time is NOT an excuse). I know
 > martin expends a lot of time on the LUG, and he is almost as busy as me.
 > And yet it seems that only the two of us are going to be at the
 > awareness day on Friday. Well thats OK because seeing as none of you
 > bothered to send me any addresses, we have no publicity for it so
 > probably nobody will be showing up anyway!
 >
 > So, now Ive had a rant, which I feel is fairly justified), lets look to
 > what we are going to do about it.

Not justified. You've made a fool out of your self because you've wasted 
your own time and you're blaming everyone else.

Mike