It's Just a Message Board, Not a Political Statement

The interns of PNNL have a listserv. A listserv is a nice place to make announcements. It is an inconvenient place to coordinate schedules of a large group. Like the poor girl who asks the listserv what weekend is best to go wakeboarding and then deals with sorting through 30 responses. Then the only people who know what is going on are the 30 who responded and so no one gets to change their minds and decide to participate. This particular listserv has the extra invconveniences of being only available at work, so not good for weekend planning, and a changing membership, so as new interns come in they don't know what is going on unless someone sends out another email announcement. Being the brilliant organizer and all around good person that I am, I created a message board where people could organize events. And post to a calendar. And create polls for people to vote on dates. Doesn't that sound nice to you? Well, it didn't sound nice to everyone on the listserv apparently, as demonstrated by these postings to the listserv:

All future volleyball postings will be on the discussion board. Unfortunately, I think we will lose some players but if it's easier to log into a discussion board then to just delete an email in your inbox then so be it.

Same with all wakeboard/boating Postings. It's a shame it had to come to this to make a few people happy.

We live in an age and a country of political correctness… it's where the masses must bend over backwards to appease the desires of the few. It is unfortunate, but it is also the unchangeable state of affairs of our society.

I totally didn't make that last one up. Some of this actually hurt my feelings. I mean, I spent time evaluating message boards, setting one up, checking that no one at PNNL would object, and I expected to spend quite a bit of additional time administrating the board. All to be nice. Fortunately, I also had several admirers who got the point. For example:

I wouldn't say anything, but "the few" should speak up and show that we are the many. Please don't get me wrong. I like the announcements, but I think the correspondence afterwards should be kept on the boards.