Halifirien said:
I don't think asking people to show courtesy and respect is treating anyone like children.
Maybe so, but adults have the option to decide who deserves their courtesy and their respect. They don't have that decided for them. I tell my cousins to be nice to people because they don't know any better. I don't feel like anyone needs to/has the right to dictate who I respect and who I don't.
I do it all the time when I'm at work. Customers come in with their requests to include baked bean suppers in the newspaper or wanting to order reprints of photos we can't sell because they're taken by the Associated Press or they call to complain the carrier missed their house. Not once in my five years working at a daily, as entertaining as stress-relieving as it might be to do so, have I ever told one of them to take a long walk off a short dock or just plain ol' told them to kiss my ass. It's called being a professional; we all know how to put up that front, even if it feels fake.
Don't get me wrong, when you're working, it's in your best interests to be professional. I've never mistreated/disrespected a customer or fellow employee in over ten years of my working life.
But that doesn't mean I don't go home, fire up SA, and complain about them elsewhere.
I commented earlier that the FB was often too Jerry Springer for my tastes, and it's true. Springer is a fun show to watch... the first few times. Then you realize how degrading and cynical and depressing it really is, which is why I don't watch that show. I suppose there's a place for bum-fights and hair-pulling knockdown dragout fights and the people who revel in participating in them, but is that what you guys are aspiring to? Because it certainly sounds that way from the FB laments some of you are making.
No, because even with the noise and the fury that it provided, the FB was also home to some of the most thought-provoking and content-rich topics this board has ever seen. Look at last year's Thread of the Year competition. Five of the nine, and three of the four largest vote-getters, were all Flameboard topics. I learned a lot both posting and reading on that board, and there are plenty of others who would agree with that. Sometimes emotion breeds the worst of us, but it also bred the best of us.
(I'm also bitter that my April Fool's thread didn't win, but how can I stand up to the entertainment that was BoL Kirin?)
If Sculli wants to raise the bar around here, I welcome the change. It'll take some adjustment, but I think most members of this community will get there. As has been mentioned, this thread has gone through multiple pages without falling into the old FB-style banter. Did it really kill you to write that way?
It's no different then speaking to a buyer/customer on the phone, treating them like perfect ladies/gentlemen while on the line (despite their attitudes) and then hanging up, turning to your co-worker, and saying what a jerk they were to you on the phone. No different then when I'd make 500+ people in the theater want nothing more than to see me die in the end (which, let's face it, being a career heel means you take the fall plenty of times) and then walk backstage and go have a burger with the hero and his romantic foil.
I was insulted more times than I'd care to remember on the Flameboard, but they never bothered me. I was told to kill myself/have someone off me in that board. Told off a thousand times. Outside that board, maybe I'd get offended. But there, who cared? You slip on the gloves, you expect to get hit.
The Flameboard Cubs was never the GD Cubs, or the GT Cubs, or the AH Cubs, at least to the best of my memory. And really, none of them are the Cubs at work, or at the gym, or the arcade. But it was a part of me I enjoyed bringing out, and is it too much to say I'm sad to see it go?
