Strange’s Second Life Blog

I’ve been running a classified for a few days, trying to hire some more writers and freelancers for SL Reports. I’ve had a really good response, so far. More than 20 people in the past 48 hours have been interested in writing. Many of them seem to “really” want to write, because it’s “what they do”. I can’t wait to see some of the things that start rolling in, now.

Tonight, I received a message from a resident, however, that I couldn’t help but be simply amazed by… and I’ll also add that I was very amused. The resident will remain anonymous, for obvious reasons. Keep in mind, while reading this, that this is a classified ad titled “Writers needed”.

She said, “hi i seen ur employment ad in the classified and i wanted to know what i need to kno to write for the sl reports”.

That was enough to make me shake my head and think to myself “No friggin’ way! This has got to be a joke.” I might not be the best writer (I know I’m not, but leaving the option open… lol). I use way too many commas, most of the time, and when I try to type fast, things don’t always get spelled the way they should. This sentence broke just about all the rules, though.

Because of the first impression that I had, I figured that there was probably no way in Hell that this person would ever write for SL Reports. I sent her back the following message:

“Reply from email: First, I’d like you to correct the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization errors in the following sentence, before we even think about talking about what else you would need to know, to write for SL Reports: “hi i seen ur employment ad in the classified and i wanted to know what i need to kno to write for the sl reports”

I knew that this was actually a relatively rude comment and suggestion, but considering that the job is a “writing” job, I think that the people writing should actually know how (or at least come close).

A few minutes later, I was actually amazed that she corrected the errors (or tried, at least) and sent it back to me. Things have been capitalized and some commas were added, but words that were spelled right in the first one were now wrong. I had to laugh when I saw the question mark at the end, though:

“Hi, I seen your employement ad in the Classified. I wanted to know what I need to know, to be able to write for the SL Reports.?”

Being an EOE (is there a such thing in SL?), I logged in and sent her a couple notecards with information about the positions that we’re filling. You never know, but with my first impression, I have a pretty good idea.

UPDATE: Two weeks later, and I still haven’t heard back from her. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 1:43 am and is filed under Posted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.