The Limits of Patience

Every so often, I’m forced to narrow my contact parameters a little bit more.  First I started turning down requests for me to do unpaid guest posts, then requests for written interviews.  More recently, I asked readers with questions to put them in a more concise form so it doesn’t take quite so much effort to read and answer them.  And now I’m afraid I need to add another one, about interviews this time:  if you want one, you’re going to need to conduct it in a way that doesn’t stress me out and require me to decode the bizarre “logic” of software engineers.  If you want to talk to me on the phone, that’s completely fine.  If you want to get together in person for an old-fashioned pad-and-pencil interview, or to record me for a podcast (either audio-only or with video) on your own equipment, we can do that.  And there are even a couple of online interview tools (Zoom and Google Hangouts) that generally work OK, though I’ve had problems with both of those (especially Hangouts) when the person who wants to interview me tries some kind of fancy thing.  If you want to use one of those, you need to assume all responsibility for technical details because I’m a whore, not a programmer; don’t think if something goes wrong I’m going to be able to figure it out on my end, because it’s very unlikely that I will, and the attempt will frustrate me and possibly even make me cry.  Skype?  Won’t work on my Chromebook.  I’m reasonably sure Facetime won’t either, because Apple, and I’m not going to try so don’t ask.  Nor will I respond well to requests that I “just download the whateveritis software” or “watch this YouTube video, it explains how to do it”.  Nope.  If you want to interview me, you need to handle the technical details of anything more complicated than “click here”, “please look into the camera” or “answer the phone”.  In short, the only part I want to have to deal with is “show up and be fabulous”, because that I’m good at.  And crying makes my makeup run.