There has been a seismic shift in my online behaviour. I’ve been fighting against it for some time, now, but I realised about an hour ago that there’s no going back. It’s official: I now TOP POST replies to my emails. I used to trim away all the extraneous guff, and insert my relevant reply underneath each point that was being made, to create a nice conversational thread – just like I was taught to by my first employer. Until fairly recently, anyone who just stuck their reply at the top of the email, and just left all the other disclaimers and various crap hanging underneath – they would make me wince. They violated the aesthetic perfection of electronic communication. For these people, a single email, containing a conversation stretching back a week, if printed out, would fill about sixteen reams of A4.

It was always a battle. Purists always did it my way. But work colleagues of the purists got irritated at not being able to scroll down and find some detail that they wrote 3 weeks previously. The purists said “hey, just go and find the relevant message in your carefully honed, nested folder system.” “Bollocks to that,” came the reply.

Anyway, I’ve given up. GMail hasn’t helped. It’s automatically set up to do it that way. For years I’ve had an automatic setting on Apple Mail which put my signature and cursor below the reply. But I’ve just changed it to above the reply. It’s official. From now on, I’m top posting. I’m leaving your message intact, along with smilies, kisses, and any information from your employer that they are in no way responsible for all your smilies and kisses. I will fight no longer. I just want to get my work done.

At the weekend, after The Schema video shoot thing (and – oh, goodness, if you’re not a LiveJournal user, you won’t have even seen the video yet – click here!) I went up to Kensal Rise to meet up with alfaguru and his wife and his quiet gothic daughter and Ant and Dani and Simon. Pleasant, it was. But I was horribly knackered. I remember reminiscing to Alf, with a grim, distant look on my face, and saying “You know what? I never had any idea what the word ‘Rubenesque’ meant, until I started internet dating.” He found that gratifyingly amusing, but hey, he didn’t have to learn the hard way, he probably knew because he read books on art, or something. Oh, haha, I just looked up “reubenesque” (spelt wrong, duh) on urbandictionary.com. Haha. Anyway, I bailed out early, and said my goodbyes, and walked straight into a cupboard that I thought was the way out. I was surrounded by mops and Cillit Bang. It was ace. No-one noticed, though, and that’s just not good enough, is it, so when I left the pub I rang Ant, and told him that I’d just walked into a cupboard by accident, and he found it really funny, but it’s not the same, is it. You can’t tell people about slapstick and expect a laugh. As I’ve just proved, over the last 100 words or so.

EDIT: a rambling interview with me on FridayCities.

EDIT2: alexdecampi, it’s the 97th most-watched video on YouTube UK today. That sounds good to me.